By Jordan
Note: The purpose of Whose Film Is It Anyway? is to examine the validity of the auteur theory through the lens of individual film-makers, taking a look at their bodies of work and highlighting the technical elements, personal style, and thematic consistency of their films. Ultimately, the goal of this column will be to generate a discussion of the merits of auteur theory through examinations of directors widely considered auteurs, analyses of directors whose status as auteurs is more tenuous, and occasional looks at non-directors who may drive the quality and content of their films with more assuredness than the directors they work with.
“It’s just not that common that someone as creatively inspired as Chris just gets carte blanche to do whatever the hell he wants. Anything he can think of—anything—he got to do it.” Joseph Gordon Levitt, on Christopher Nolan
One thing that is important to realize when considering the auteur theory, something that we have struggled with throughout the last year of this feature, is the collaborative nature of film. It can be difficult to argue for a single author of a film that involved the work of hundreds of people. Studios and producers can require input, screenwriters can exert their own voice, actors can change lines or even plot points, cinematographers can contribute a feel all their own to the film, and even costume designers, location scouts, and stunt coordinators can all play an essential role in putting together a complete film. Especially in our current age, many films are made or broken by studio executives based on very brief pitches.
So it is fitting that the final director I will cover in this first run of Whose Film Is It Anyway? columns is one of the few auteurs working today who has managed to solve this problem of studio interference and make big budget movies his own way. How has Christopher Nolan transcended the standard problems that plague a director of blockbuster movies? It’s simple, really: he made a fuck-ton of money (to be clear, “fuck-ton” is more an estimate than an actual scientific or mathematical term). Rather than examining the recurrent themes or technical accomplishments of Nolan’s career (though both could easily be the subject of a full column), I want to take this opportunity to look at the evolution of the auteur, from his humble independent roots to his huge budget freedoms, hopefully shedding some light on a path to vast success and unlimited influence for an auteur along the way.
Nolan started his directorial career with Following, a neo-noir released in 1998 and filmed for just $6,000. Shot using a cast who was working full time and locations made up mostly of the houses of his family and friends, the film follows a young man (Jeremy Theobald) who is drawn into the life of serial burglar Cobb (Alex Haw) and becomes increasingly involved in an underworld he fails to understand. The film introduces several tendencies that will recur throughout his work (non-linear storytelling, twist endings, noir-ish themes and even a man named Cobb will all be seen again in his career), but most importantly proved that Nolan could, and would, shoot a movie for little to no money in order to retain full artistic freedom.
After the critical success of his first film, Nolan was able to secure almost $5 million to produce his follow-up, Memento. Based on a short story written by his brother Jonathan and a screenplay he wrote himself, Memento follows Leonard (Guy Pearce), a man inflicted with anterograde amnesia who is searching for his wife’s killer (dead wives and lovers are another recurring element to Nolan’s oeuvre). Playing out in reverse order, the movie plays with notions of identity and reality, both of which are central themes Nolan returns to repeatedly. The movie scored two Oscar nominations (Best Original Screenplay and Best Film Editing), and got Nolan his first studio directing job.
Nolan directed the 2002 remake of the Norwegian film Insomnia next, working with his largest budget to date by far ($46 million) and working for the first time with the studio he has remained with to this day, Warner Bros. A psychological thriller following two detectives (Al Pacino and Martin Donovan) out to investigate a murder in a town afflicted with perpetual daylight, the film examines perception, memory, guilt and ethical compromises, effectively recasting the original film for American audiences (who, of course, hate subtitles).
Following the success of Insomnia, Nolan convinced Warner Bros. to take a chance on him for the revival of the Batman franchise, which had been dead ever since Batman and Robin killed anyone’s desire to ever see a Batman movie again. Fortunately, Nolan aimed for a more grounded approach to the story, and the resultant Batman Begins cemented him as a blockbuster director capable of handling big budget projects and turning them into hits. Unlike most big budget productions, Nolan refused to use a second unit (generally a back up team that shoots less important scenes, like establishing shots and cut aways, while the first unit shoots the big scenes with the actors or action set pieces) in order to keep his vision consistent. The film also plays with several of Nolan’s pet themes, examining fear, duality, father figures and differing notions of justice.
Nolan had been working on his next film, The Prestige for years, having been approached with the novel and having tasked his brother with the writing of the screenplay (which he eventually revised and rewrote, earning himself a screenplay credit as well). Working with a smaller budget than Batman Begins, Nolan was able to secure himself the freedom he needed to structure the film in his own inventive, nonlinear style to mirror the three elements of the illusion in the film: the pledge, the turn, and the prestige. The film thematically mirrors much of Nolan’s other work (focusing again on perception, duality, and obsession) and performed well at the box office.
Nolan achieved his biggest success, however, and the film that has assured him the freedom he now enjoys, was 2008’s smash hit The Dark Knight, which became the highest grossing film ever made, if only you don’t count that James Cameron guy. Arguably the apex of Nolan’s career, The Dark Knight plays with most of Nolan’s recurring themes while also serving as a meditation on terrorism, the limits of vigilantism, and the lengths a person must go to in order to truly battle evil.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIj2uL2f1rE
After the monumental success of The Dark Knight, Warner Bros. was desperate to entice Nolan to return for a third time to the franchise. While this has never been confirmed, it is widely rumored that Nolan agreed to direct a third Batman movie if Warner Bros. would allow him total freedom to create the big budget project of his dreams: Inception. Based on an idea that had plagued him since high school and working off of a screenplay he had written over the course of the previous decade, Inception takes Nolan’s recurring questions about perception and reality, his predilection for dead wives, and the big budget aesthetic he has developed since Batman Begins and creates his most personal and original film to date.
Inception is more important, though, for what it represents than for what it is actually about. Based solely on his previous successes (and theoretically the promised future success of another smash hit Batman movie), Christopher Nolan was able to get Warner Bros. to hand him $160 million to make an incredibly high concept and complex movie exactly the way he wanted to. When he decided he wanted the trailers to reveal nothing of the plot, they acquiesced. When he chose to leave the ending ambiguous, they relented. When he wanted to build a rotating set and shoot Joseph Gordon Levitt in zero gravity, he was allowed to. All of this is important because of what it says about the potential of the auteur theory. Christopher Nolan has achieved a remarkable level of success, but he has managed to do so without ever compromising his vision, instead figuring out how to incorporate it so successfully that he can make pretty much any movie he wants at this point and set his own budget.
Movies are made through the collaboration of hundreds of people in one capacity or another. Most auteurs earn the label by transcending these challenges and miraculously leaving their own mark on their movies, even in spite of the pitfalls and people that often stand in the way of just that. Christopher Nolan is a different sort of auteur, though. Where most auteurs work within the confines of the system, Nolan has remade the system to allow himself the freedom he wants and the money he needs to communicate his vision. By using his vast marketability as leverage, he has managed to become the sort of director who can make any movie he wants, at any price, and always manage to ensure that it is completely and utterly his own.
Read more Whose Film Is It Anyway? here
Coming up on Whose Film Is It Anyway?:
Note: Whose Film Is It Anyway? will go on indefinite hiatus after the final installment.
5/8: Notes on the Auteur Theory in 2011
Want to keep tabs on all of our updates? follow us on twitter @reviewtobenamed (follow us here).
Showing posts with label auteur theory. Show all posts
Showing posts with label auteur theory. Show all posts
Sunday, April 24, 2011
Sunday, April 10, 2011
Whose Film Is It Anyway?: Aaron Sorkin
By Jordan
Note: The purpose of Whose Film Is It Anyway? is to examine the validity of the auteur theory through the lens of individual film-makers, taking a look at their bodies of work and highlighting the technical elements, personal style, and thematic consistency of their films. Ultimately, the goal of this column will be to generate a discussion of the merits of auteur theory through examinations of directors widely considered auteurs, analyses of directors whose status as auteurs is more tenuous, and occasional looks at non-directors who may drive the quality and content of their films with more assuredness than the directors they work with.
“I love writing but hate starting. The page is awfully white and it says, ‘You may have fooled some of the people some of the time but those days are over, giftless. I’m not your agent and I’m not your mommy. I’m a white piece of paper, you wanna dance with me?’ And I really, really don’t.”-Aaron Sorkin
“Listen lady, a gender I write very well when the story calls for it, we make horse drawn carriages and the first Model T just rolled into town.”-Aaron Sorkin as himself, 30 Rock
When I began brainstorming this column, I honestly believed I would be able to consistently defend the idea of the screenwriter as the true author of a film. It just seemed to make sense to me that the person who wrote the actual story, the words everyone spoke, the actions everyone performed, the person who created the very conflict that drove the film, would be an arguable author of the final product. While I’ll discuss this more in depth in this column’s (temporary) conclusion next month, it turns out I was largely wrong on that front. Let’s play a little game, shall we? Name your five favorite screenwriters. I’ll simplify that even further. Name five screenwriters whose attachment to a project means you’ll absolutely see it (And no cheating and naming writer-directors either. Just the scribes, kids). My guess (and please correct me in the comments if I’m wrong) is that you had trouble putting that list together. I know I would have. Because when I hear Charlie Kaufman has written a movie, I’m there. David Mamet is pretty hit and miss, but I’ll probably tend to see his new movies when they come out unless the film in question sounds terrible or prominently features his wife Rebecca Pidgeon who makes me want to gouge out my eyes and ears and throw heavy things at the screen until she goes away. Beyond those two, only one writer will send me running for the theater on opening day: Aaron Sorkin.
This is a film column by nature, and so I will focus on Sorkin’s movies to make my point, but it would be silly for me to gloss over Sorkin’s television career in a discussion of his status as the author of his works. Television, as a rule, is written by a variety of writers on a rotation to ensure there is no delay in the production schedule. Even most of the television shows you associate with one show runner are usually written by a variety of people. David Simon is the brains behind The Wire and received story credit on all but ten episodes, yet he only wrote the teleplays for 20 of the show’s 60 episodes. David Chase is the heart and soul of The Sopranos and was involved in all of the writing, but he only wrote the full script for 30 of the show’s 86 episodes. Joss Whedon wrote only 24 of Buffy’s 144 episodes, Alan Ball wrote only 9 of Six Feet Under’s 60 episodes, and Larry David wrote 62 of Seinfeld’s 180 episodes. By contrast, Aaron Sorkin wrote or co-wrote 40 of the 45 episodes of Sports Night, wrote or co-wrote 86 of the 89 episodes of The West Wing before he was fired, and every single one of Studio 60’s 22 episodes. When Aaron Sorkin is the name on a television show, you can bet the farm that he’ll be writing pretty much every episode, crafting the arcs, character development, dialogue, and, since he handpicks the directors of his shows, and generally uses Thomas Schlamme, has a hand in their direction as well.
But we aren’t here to talk about Sorkin’s television career, where he is surely the master of his domain. Sorkin has turned in scripts for five movies over the last two decades, and each bears his mark so strongly, it is impossible not to think of them as Aaron Sorkin films. Even when Sorkin works with strong directors who may themselves be considered auteurs, he manages to make each and every one of his films his own, filled to the brim with his signature witty repartee, hyper-literate references, passionate idealism and focus on committed professionals.
His first screenplay was based off of his own play, and directed by Rob Reiner. A Few Good Men follows a lazy and inexperienced lawyer (Tom Cruise) who becomes a passionate advocate when he is required to defend two soldiers accused of killing a fellow recruit during a hazing ritual. With the help of his best friend (Kevin Pollack) and another investigator (Demi Moore), he manages to make his case that his clients were just following the orders of base commander Colonel Nathan Jessup (Jack Nicholson, who was nominated for Best Supporting Actor for his tour de force performance). Despite working under the very experienced Reiner, there is no doubt that Sorkin’s influence shines through the strongest. From the lightning quick banter to the passionate idealism of the characters and their strong dedication to doing their jobs, it is clear that the script took center stage during the filming process.
Sorkin’s next big project had him teamed with Rob Reiner once again for the political romantic comedy The American President. Often referred to as Sorkin’s “test balloon” for The West Wing, Reiner helped Sorkin get the film produced to prove the viability of a television show about the president of the united states, which Sorkin would finally bring to television four years later. The film follows widowed President Andrew Shepherd (Michael Douglas) as he struggles to maintain a relationship with a lobbyist (Annette Bening) while passing a crime bill that will consolidate his approval rating before his reelection campaign. The film is clearly a blueprint for the series to come, and the two share plotlines, dialogue, and even cast members (Martin Sheen plays the Chief of Staff in the film and President Bartlet on the show, and five other cast members from the film played roles on the series). From the film’s inception to its release, this was Sorkin’s project, with Reiner agreeing to direct only to ensure the film would be produced and released by a studio.
Over a decade later, Sorkin returned to film with Charlie Wilson’s War, which paired him with directorial titan Mike Nichols as he adapted the book by George Crile. Congressman Charlie Wilson (Tom Hanks) is more partier than politician until his friend and sometimes lover Joanne Herring (Julia Roberts) convinces him he has to help the Afghan people in their struggle against the Soviets. Wilson befriends CIA Agent Gust Avrakotos (Oscar nominated Phillip Seymour Hoffman) and becomes a passionate advocate for arming the people of Afghanistan. While the film is clearly a Mike Nichols movie, Sorkin’s influence permeates every scene, from the similarities between Wilson’s development and the development of Tom Cruise’s character in A Few Good Men to the ideologies espoused throughout the film. Rumors have surfaced that the ending of Sorkin’s screenplay differs majorly from the ending of the film, which gives Charlie Wilson a happy ending and avoids directly referencing the 9/11 attacks. According to sources from the set, Tom Hanks demanded that the ending be altered and Nichols and Sorkin complied, though neither was happy with the change.
Perhaps the most fascinating pairing of writer to director in his career, last year’s The Social Network, which finally won Sorkin Best Adapted Screenplay, paired Sorkin with the incredibly distinctive David Fincher. While the film does play with Fincher’s pet themes about obsession, power, and the dark side of the human soul, Sorkin’s dialogue and predilection for characters who are addicted to their work above all else shine through just as strongly. Mark Zuckerberg (Jess Eisenberg, nominated for Best Actor for the role) somehow manages to be both a stock Fincher and Sorkin protagonist, making him a fascinating study of the dark side of dedication and the isolation of intelligence and arrogance. When I first heard that Sorkin and Fincher were teaming up for The Social Network, I wasn’t sure how the combination of two consistently strong visions would work out, yet the film is a complete triumph, giving us the best of both men’s work in one two hour tour de force.
The script for The Social Network is so completely engrossing and enjoyable, I actually found myself continually hoping the film would never end. While Fincher’s work on the movie is incredible (and, if I ever get around to covering Fincher for this column, his work will be examined and praised even more closely), it is Sorkin’s gift for dialogue that lifts the movie into the stratosphere, giving it easily the best script of last year. The conflicts spark with such verbal vitriol it is actually pulse-poundingly tense just to watch the characters sit across a deposition table from each other, so dynamic that even their discussions of intellectual property sizzle with multiple meanings, sarcasm, and subtle character developments.
As Sorkin playfully warned during his recent cameo on 30 Rock, the importance of the writer in Hollywood is constantly in danger of sliding toward irrelevance, yet the strength of a few great writers is enough to remind the skeptical of the importance of the written word. When examining one of the movies written by Aaron Sorkin, or any of the television series he has written, his influence on their quality is clear. He is a constant reminder that without a great script, it is difficult to make a great movie, and each of Sorkin’s always excellent screenplays makes the movie truly, meaningfully his, even when he has to compete with some of the greatest auteurs of our age for the privilege of saying so.
Read more Whose Film Is It Anyway? here
Coming up on Whose Film Is It Anyway?:
Note: Whose Film Is It Anyway? will go on indefinite hiatus after these final two installments.
4/24: Christopher Nolan
5/8: Notes on the Auteur Theory in 2011
Want to keep tabs on all of our updates? follow us on twitter @reviewtobenamed (follow us here).
Note: The purpose of Whose Film Is It Anyway? is to examine the validity of the auteur theory through the lens of individual film-makers, taking a look at their bodies of work and highlighting the technical elements, personal style, and thematic consistency of their films. Ultimately, the goal of this column will be to generate a discussion of the merits of auteur theory through examinations of directors widely considered auteurs, analyses of directors whose status as auteurs is more tenuous, and occasional looks at non-directors who may drive the quality and content of their films with more assuredness than the directors they work with.
“I love writing but hate starting. The page is awfully white and it says, ‘You may have fooled some of the people some of the time but those days are over, giftless. I’m not your agent and I’m not your mommy. I’m a white piece of paper, you wanna dance with me?’ And I really, really don’t.”-Aaron Sorkin
“Listen lady, a gender I write very well when the story calls for it, we make horse drawn carriages and the first Model T just rolled into town.”-Aaron Sorkin as himself, 30 Rock
When I began brainstorming this column, I honestly believed I would be able to consistently defend the idea of the screenwriter as the true author of a film. It just seemed to make sense to me that the person who wrote the actual story, the words everyone spoke, the actions everyone performed, the person who created the very conflict that drove the film, would be an arguable author of the final product. While I’ll discuss this more in depth in this column’s (temporary) conclusion next month, it turns out I was largely wrong on that front. Let’s play a little game, shall we? Name your five favorite screenwriters. I’ll simplify that even further. Name five screenwriters whose attachment to a project means you’ll absolutely see it (And no cheating and naming writer-directors either. Just the scribes, kids). My guess (and please correct me in the comments if I’m wrong) is that you had trouble putting that list together. I know I would have. Because when I hear Charlie Kaufman has written a movie, I’m there. David Mamet is pretty hit and miss, but I’ll probably tend to see his new movies when they come out unless the film in question sounds terrible or prominently features his wife Rebecca Pidgeon who makes me want to gouge out my eyes and ears and throw heavy things at the screen until she goes away. Beyond those two, only one writer will send me running for the theater on opening day: Aaron Sorkin.
This is a film column by nature, and so I will focus on Sorkin’s movies to make my point, but it would be silly for me to gloss over Sorkin’s television career in a discussion of his status as the author of his works. Television, as a rule, is written by a variety of writers on a rotation to ensure there is no delay in the production schedule. Even most of the television shows you associate with one show runner are usually written by a variety of people. David Simon is the brains behind The Wire and received story credit on all but ten episodes, yet he only wrote the teleplays for 20 of the show’s 60 episodes. David Chase is the heart and soul of The Sopranos and was involved in all of the writing, but he only wrote the full script for 30 of the show’s 86 episodes. Joss Whedon wrote only 24 of Buffy’s 144 episodes, Alan Ball wrote only 9 of Six Feet Under’s 60 episodes, and Larry David wrote 62 of Seinfeld’s 180 episodes. By contrast, Aaron Sorkin wrote or co-wrote 40 of the 45 episodes of Sports Night, wrote or co-wrote 86 of the 89 episodes of The West Wing before he was fired, and every single one of Studio 60’s 22 episodes. When Aaron Sorkin is the name on a television show, you can bet the farm that he’ll be writing pretty much every episode, crafting the arcs, character development, dialogue, and, since he handpicks the directors of his shows, and generally uses Thomas Schlamme, has a hand in their direction as well.
But we aren’t here to talk about Sorkin’s television career, where he is surely the master of his domain. Sorkin has turned in scripts for five movies over the last two decades, and each bears his mark so strongly, it is impossible not to think of them as Aaron Sorkin films. Even when Sorkin works with strong directors who may themselves be considered auteurs, he manages to make each and every one of his films his own, filled to the brim with his signature witty repartee, hyper-literate references, passionate idealism and focus on committed professionals.
His first screenplay was based off of his own play, and directed by Rob Reiner. A Few Good Men follows a lazy and inexperienced lawyer (Tom Cruise) who becomes a passionate advocate when he is required to defend two soldiers accused of killing a fellow recruit during a hazing ritual. With the help of his best friend (Kevin Pollack) and another investigator (Demi Moore), he manages to make his case that his clients were just following the orders of base commander Colonel Nathan Jessup (Jack Nicholson, who was nominated for Best Supporting Actor for his tour de force performance). Despite working under the very experienced Reiner, there is no doubt that Sorkin’s influence shines through the strongest. From the lightning quick banter to the passionate idealism of the characters and their strong dedication to doing their jobs, it is clear that the script took center stage during the filming process.
Sorkin’s next big project had him teamed with Rob Reiner once again for the political romantic comedy The American President. Often referred to as Sorkin’s “test balloon” for The West Wing, Reiner helped Sorkin get the film produced to prove the viability of a television show about the president of the united states, which Sorkin would finally bring to television four years later. The film follows widowed President Andrew Shepherd (Michael Douglas) as he struggles to maintain a relationship with a lobbyist (Annette Bening) while passing a crime bill that will consolidate his approval rating before his reelection campaign. The film is clearly a blueprint for the series to come, and the two share plotlines, dialogue, and even cast members (Martin Sheen plays the Chief of Staff in the film and President Bartlet on the show, and five other cast members from the film played roles on the series). From the film’s inception to its release, this was Sorkin’s project, with Reiner agreeing to direct only to ensure the film would be produced and released by a studio.
Over a decade later, Sorkin returned to film with Charlie Wilson’s War, which paired him with directorial titan Mike Nichols as he adapted the book by George Crile. Congressman Charlie Wilson (Tom Hanks) is more partier than politician until his friend and sometimes lover Joanne Herring (Julia Roberts) convinces him he has to help the Afghan people in their struggle against the Soviets. Wilson befriends CIA Agent Gust Avrakotos (Oscar nominated Phillip Seymour Hoffman) and becomes a passionate advocate for arming the people of Afghanistan. While the film is clearly a Mike Nichols movie, Sorkin’s influence permeates every scene, from the similarities between Wilson’s development and the development of Tom Cruise’s character in A Few Good Men to the ideologies espoused throughout the film. Rumors have surfaced that the ending of Sorkin’s screenplay differs majorly from the ending of the film, which gives Charlie Wilson a happy ending and avoids directly referencing the 9/11 attacks. According to sources from the set, Tom Hanks demanded that the ending be altered and Nichols and Sorkin complied, though neither was happy with the change.
Perhaps the most fascinating pairing of writer to director in his career, last year’s The Social Network, which finally won Sorkin Best Adapted Screenplay, paired Sorkin with the incredibly distinctive David Fincher. While the film does play with Fincher’s pet themes about obsession, power, and the dark side of the human soul, Sorkin’s dialogue and predilection for characters who are addicted to their work above all else shine through just as strongly. Mark Zuckerberg (Jess Eisenberg, nominated for Best Actor for the role) somehow manages to be both a stock Fincher and Sorkin protagonist, making him a fascinating study of the dark side of dedication and the isolation of intelligence and arrogance. When I first heard that Sorkin and Fincher were teaming up for The Social Network, I wasn’t sure how the combination of two consistently strong visions would work out, yet the film is a complete triumph, giving us the best of both men’s work in one two hour tour de force.
The script for The Social Network is so completely engrossing and enjoyable, I actually found myself continually hoping the film would never end. While Fincher’s work on the movie is incredible (and, if I ever get around to covering Fincher for this column, his work will be examined and praised even more closely), it is Sorkin’s gift for dialogue that lifts the movie into the stratosphere, giving it easily the best script of last year. The conflicts spark with such verbal vitriol it is actually pulse-poundingly tense just to watch the characters sit across a deposition table from each other, so dynamic that even their discussions of intellectual property sizzle with multiple meanings, sarcasm, and subtle character developments.
As Sorkin playfully warned during his recent cameo on 30 Rock, the importance of the writer in Hollywood is constantly in danger of sliding toward irrelevance, yet the strength of a few great writers is enough to remind the skeptical of the importance of the written word. When examining one of the movies written by Aaron Sorkin, or any of the television series he has written, his influence on their quality is clear. He is a constant reminder that without a great script, it is difficult to make a great movie, and each of Sorkin’s always excellent screenplays makes the movie truly, meaningfully his, even when he has to compete with some of the greatest auteurs of our age for the privilege of saying so.
Read more Whose Film Is It Anyway? here
Coming up on Whose Film Is It Anyway?:
Note: Whose Film Is It Anyway? will go on indefinite hiatus after these final two installments.
4/24: Christopher Nolan
5/8: Notes on the Auteur Theory in 2011
Want to keep tabs on all of our updates? follow us on twitter @reviewtobenamed (follow us here).
Sunday, March 27, 2011
Whose Film Is It Anyway?: Michael Bay
By Jordan
Note: The purpose of Whose Film Is It Anyway? is to examine the validity of the auteur theory through the lens of individual film-makers, taking a look at their bodies of work and highlighting the technical elements, personal style, and thematic consistency of their films. Ultimately, the goal of this column will be to generate a discussion of the merits of auteur theory through examinations of directors widely considered auteurs, analyses of directors whose status as auteurs is more tenuous, and occasional looks at non-directors who may drive the quality and content of their films with more assuredness than the directors they work with.
“I know you’re new to the whole human experience, but there is one universal truth: you never give a woman your credit card!”-James McCord (Steve Buscemi), The Island
Michael Bay is a name not to be thrown out likely in circles of cinephiles. Widely disliked, and occasionally passionately despised, he is a director serious movie fans prefer to either dismiss or deride. In fact, I have often heard news of the commercial success of one of his films heralded as a sign of the end times of film as an artistic form. I did not choose to do a column on Michael Bay because I like his movies (that is certainly not the case), nor did I make the decision lightly. Some of his movies run nearly three hours, and, especially in the case of Pearl Harbor, that can be a torturous experience. I wanted to do a column on him in an effort to make a point about the auteur theory I don’t think I’ve communicated so far: it does not take quality into account. A director is called an auteur not because they make consistently good films, but that they make films that are consistent. In fact, in the early days of the theory, it was a common practice to examine a director’s worst films to see if the technical elements, personal flourishes, and thematic concerns remained consistent even if the film wasn’t very good. And so, in a flurry of masochism and to illustrate the point as best I know how, I have undertaken to peer beneath the smooth, shapeless veneer of Michael Bay’s films and examine them for the consistency that would be required to call the man, easily among my least favorite directors, an auteur.
I want to look at three aspects of his films, all shockingly easy to identify if you’ve watched any or all of them, and from those make the argument that Michael Bay should be considered an auteur, even though he should also be considered a manipulative, shallow, childish and misogynistic hack. That last point is probably as good a place as any to begin our examination of Bay as an auteur. For a man that traffics in blockbusters packed with gorgeous women and what I’m sure he would call “sexually charged situations,” Bay is surprisingly, even disconcertingly timid about the down and dirty practice of (dare I say it?) the sex. To Michael Bay, women never seem to become actual characters with actual motivations. In one of his films, women are objects: you can ogle them, sure, but you aren’t really supposed to have sex with them.
This is laid out very clearly in the Bad Boys series. The first one has Tea Leoni, whose best friend is a hooker she accompanies on a job and sees murdered (perhaps because she engages in the most shameful practice in a Michael Bay film), in a constant parade of shockingly short skirts and high heels. Objectified to an insulting degree throughout the movie, Leoni never actually has sex in the film. In fact, no one does. It is constantly referred to that Will Smith’s Mike Lowery has a lot of sex and is a total playboy (because that means he’s cool, right?) but we never see him have sex, nor is it implied that he has any during the movie. And his partner Marcus Burnett (Martin Lawrence) just complains for the whole run time about how his wife never has sex with him. Burnett’s wife is one of my least favorite cinematic tropes (and one I have ranted about before), the shrewish wife who is so horrible to her husband there is no way he would ever stay married to her. Not only does she withhold sex from him, she does it because he has to work late. In Bay’s view, women are there to get in the way of you doing cool shit with your bros, not to actually have a real relationship with.
In Bad Boys II, super-player Mike Lowery has an actual girlfriend Syd (Gabrielle Union) but seems to only want to make out with her. And even that is too much for his partner, who just happens to be Syd’s brother. A subplot of the film is how angry Marcus gets at Mike for dating his sister. Fortunately, by the end of the movie he has made peace with the incredibly chaste relationship. This trend is almost perfectly exemplified by a scene in Bad Boys II where our heroes admire a dead woman’s fake breasts. The only nudity you will see in a Michael Bay film comes removed from any worry that you might actually have to have sex afterwards. The only time the two characters seem to be comfortable discussing breasts is once the woman possessing them is dead and they can be lewd over her corpse.
Whether they are pregnant wives left to worry about their adventurous husbands, like Vanessa Marcil in The Rock, sheltered daughters torn between their love for Dad and their desire to actually have an adult relationship like Liv Tyler in Armageddon (she’s also left on Earth while the men, and one shockingly de-sexualized woman go to blow up the big asteroid), or stuck doing a “woman’s job” like nursing until they get knocked up by a protagonist like Kate Beckinsale in Pearl Harbor, the women in Bay’s films are caricatures at best, and objects the rest of the time.
Michael Bay deals with relationships like he’s a 14-year-old boy guessing what they might be. He’s too horny to deal with women as actual people, so the idea of them as naked objects takes over, but he’s also too immature to have put thought into what he might actually do if a willing girl showed up naked on his doorstep. Girls are still things of fantasy; dealing with them as sexual beings in and of themselves is uncomfortable if not just icky. Bay may be most like Lincoln Six Echo, Ewan McGregor’s character from The Island. He likes Scarlett Johansson obviously and from the very beginning, but because he’s a clone, his sex drive and knowledge of the act has been completely removed, so his attraction to her remains stunted and chaste for most of the film’s run time. He literally doesn’t know what sex is, which seems to be the best position for a Bay protagonist to be in (to be fair, McGregor and Johansson do actually have sex by the film’s end, but only right before he leaves her to go blow up some shit, in spite of the fact that she is a better fighter).
There is a slight shift in this in Bay’s last two movies, the first two installments in the probably endless Transformers series. Megan Fox actually gets to fight giant robots, date Shia LaBeouf (apparently she wants that), and care about being in an adult relationship (though by the definitions of the film, that means she wants LaBeouf to say “I love you”). As a counter balance to this nebulous progress, though, she is objectified far more than any other female lead, from being bent over the hood of a car in the first film to being even more bent over a motor cycle in the second one. I could probably write the rest of this column on the downright creepy state of arrested development Bay seems caught in when it comes to relationships, but instead, let’s look at some other signs of his stunted growth.
Michael Bay, like many a rebellious teenage boy, has trouble with authority figures. In Bad Boys, its internal affairs, who apparently wants to investigate our heroes for some vague and never really defined reason. Because this is a Michael Bay movie, the investigation never goes anywhere and what would be investigated is never really defined, but that isn’t really the point. Bay’s movies don’t have plots so much as they have some idea what a plot should look like; they are less concerned with conflict than with the fact that if somebody doesn’t start shooting at somebody soon, things might get boring. And if there’s one thing Bay never wants, it’s for a movie of his to get boring.
In The Rock, the whole plot is set in motion because Ed Harris’ army man decides to take over Alcatraz and hold San Francisco hostage in order to extort the government out of money they didn’t pay to the families of soldiers who died on black ops missions. Sure, Ed Harris takes 80 hostages and threatens to release biological weapons on a huge city to get what he wants, but this is only because Uncle Sam and all the greedy politicians in Washington refused to pay money to the families of dead soldiers. So who is really the bad guy? Also, John Mason (Sean Connery), the man who has the knowledge of Alcatraz needed to stop Harris, is a British spy illegally detained by the government because he knew too much.
In Armageddon, the only reason the world isn’t completely destroyed is because Bay’s heroes are a rag tag bunch of criminals and misfits who just won’t follow the rules, man. At one point, the President orders some general (Keith David, always fun to have around) to detonate the nuke on the asteroid, in spite of the fact that every scientist in the room is saying that will only kill everyone they sent up there and then ensure the destruction of mankind. Fortunately, head of NASA Billy Bob Thornton is a rebel who cuts communications to keep the bomb from detonating. Later, leader of the drill team Harry Stamper (Bruce Willis) has to strangle the shuttle’s pilot (William Fitchner) for a while to keep him from blowing everybody up. The government, in Bay’s view, is full of selfish and stupid bureaucrats who will ruin everyone’s fun unless they are stopped. Even in Pearl Harbor where Bay has to go easy on the government because he’s constrained by reality, the polio-stricken and wheelchair bound Roosevelt has to literally stand up to force his cabinet to realize the severity of the attack.
The final tendency I want to discuss probably seems obvious, yet still needs to be laid out as a consistent aspect of Bay’s films: the “more is always better” approach he takes to making them. One can say a lot of terrible things about Bay’s movies, and I have, but the charge it is most difficult to levy against him is that his movies are boring (with the exception of Pearl Harbor, because Jesus that movie is long and boring). His movies are over-stuffed with action to the point of sheer gluttony. The Island plays out like a two hour long chase scene, with barely enough time for exposition between all of the car chases and exploding helicopters. Before things even really get going in The Rock (which is my pick, if forced, for Bay’s best movie, a nearly meaningless distinction akin to picking out the rotting food that tastes the best) we have an attack on a military base, a bomb scare, and an insane and ridiculously long car chase through the streets of San Francisco that has so little to do with the actual plot, it might have been thrown in there because Bay realized the movie would be too short without it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-PCs8V7nLg
Michael Bay is so successful, in my estimation, not because he makes good movies (he clearly doesn’t) but because he makes consistent movies. When a Michael Bay movie is released, if you go to see it you know exactly what you’ll get. You know there won’t be any plot to speak of, sure, but you also know you’ll see scantily clad women, gun fights, car chases, and explosions. And perhaps just as importantly, you know you’ll see A LOT of all of that. Bay makes terrible movies, and though I’ve never met the man personally, an analysis of his work tells me he’s probably not a great human being. He’s immature, simplistic, misogynistic, shallow, and by all measures, a hack but his movies are absolutely and completely his. The mind behind Armageddon, Bad Boys, The Island, and Transformers may be a simple one, but what it puts up on the screens is a personal expression, whether we like it or not. Michael Bay’s movies have personality, even though that personality is one that I fervently dislike and wish didn’t exist. I don’t love any of his movies (though I can definitely say that some are more enjoyable than others), but I see why so many people do. You know what you’re going to get when you see a Michael Bay movie, and he delivers it so consistently, it is impossible not to consider the man an auteur.
Read more Whose Film Is It Anyway? here
Coming up on Who's Film Is It Anyway?:
Note: Whose Film Is It Anyway? will go on indefinite hiatus after these final three installments.
4/10:Aaron Sorkin
4/24: Christopher Nolan
5/8: Notes on the Auteur Theory in 2011
Want to keep tabs on all of our updates? follow us on twitter @reviewtobenamed (follow us here).
Note: The purpose of Whose Film Is It Anyway? is to examine the validity of the auteur theory through the lens of individual film-makers, taking a look at their bodies of work and highlighting the technical elements, personal style, and thematic consistency of their films. Ultimately, the goal of this column will be to generate a discussion of the merits of auteur theory through examinations of directors widely considered auteurs, analyses of directors whose status as auteurs is more tenuous, and occasional looks at non-directors who may drive the quality and content of their films with more assuredness than the directors they work with.
“I know you’re new to the whole human experience, but there is one universal truth: you never give a woman your credit card!”-James McCord (Steve Buscemi), The Island
Michael Bay is a name not to be thrown out likely in circles of cinephiles. Widely disliked, and occasionally passionately despised, he is a director serious movie fans prefer to either dismiss or deride. In fact, I have often heard news of the commercial success of one of his films heralded as a sign of the end times of film as an artistic form. I did not choose to do a column on Michael Bay because I like his movies (that is certainly not the case), nor did I make the decision lightly. Some of his movies run nearly three hours, and, especially in the case of Pearl Harbor, that can be a torturous experience. I wanted to do a column on him in an effort to make a point about the auteur theory I don’t think I’ve communicated so far: it does not take quality into account. A director is called an auteur not because they make consistently good films, but that they make films that are consistent. In fact, in the early days of the theory, it was a common practice to examine a director’s worst films to see if the technical elements, personal flourishes, and thematic concerns remained consistent even if the film wasn’t very good. And so, in a flurry of masochism and to illustrate the point as best I know how, I have undertaken to peer beneath the smooth, shapeless veneer of Michael Bay’s films and examine them for the consistency that would be required to call the man, easily among my least favorite directors, an auteur.
I want to look at three aspects of his films, all shockingly easy to identify if you’ve watched any or all of them, and from those make the argument that Michael Bay should be considered an auteur, even though he should also be considered a manipulative, shallow, childish and misogynistic hack. That last point is probably as good a place as any to begin our examination of Bay as an auteur. For a man that traffics in blockbusters packed with gorgeous women and what I’m sure he would call “sexually charged situations,” Bay is surprisingly, even disconcertingly timid about the down and dirty practice of (dare I say it?) the sex. To Michael Bay, women never seem to become actual characters with actual motivations. In one of his films, women are objects: you can ogle them, sure, but you aren’t really supposed to have sex with them.
This is laid out very clearly in the Bad Boys series. The first one has Tea Leoni, whose best friend is a hooker she accompanies on a job and sees murdered (perhaps because she engages in the most shameful practice in a Michael Bay film), in a constant parade of shockingly short skirts and high heels. Objectified to an insulting degree throughout the movie, Leoni never actually has sex in the film. In fact, no one does. It is constantly referred to that Will Smith’s Mike Lowery has a lot of sex and is a total playboy (because that means he’s cool, right?) but we never see him have sex, nor is it implied that he has any during the movie. And his partner Marcus Burnett (Martin Lawrence) just complains for the whole run time about how his wife never has sex with him. Burnett’s wife is one of my least favorite cinematic tropes (and one I have ranted about before), the shrewish wife who is so horrible to her husband there is no way he would ever stay married to her. Not only does she withhold sex from him, she does it because he has to work late. In Bay’s view, women are there to get in the way of you doing cool shit with your bros, not to actually have a real relationship with.
In Bad Boys II, super-player Mike Lowery has an actual girlfriend Syd (Gabrielle Union) but seems to only want to make out with her. And even that is too much for his partner, who just happens to be Syd’s brother. A subplot of the film is how angry Marcus gets at Mike for dating his sister. Fortunately, by the end of the movie he has made peace with the incredibly chaste relationship. This trend is almost perfectly exemplified by a scene in Bad Boys II where our heroes admire a dead woman’s fake breasts. The only nudity you will see in a Michael Bay film comes removed from any worry that you might actually have to have sex afterwards. The only time the two characters seem to be comfortable discussing breasts is once the woman possessing them is dead and they can be lewd over her corpse.
Whether they are pregnant wives left to worry about their adventurous husbands, like Vanessa Marcil in The Rock, sheltered daughters torn between their love for Dad and their desire to actually have an adult relationship like Liv Tyler in Armageddon (she’s also left on Earth while the men, and one shockingly de-sexualized woman go to blow up the big asteroid), or stuck doing a “woman’s job” like nursing until they get knocked up by a protagonist like Kate Beckinsale in Pearl Harbor, the women in Bay’s films are caricatures at best, and objects the rest of the time.
Michael Bay deals with relationships like he’s a 14-year-old boy guessing what they might be. He’s too horny to deal with women as actual people, so the idea of them as naked objects takes over, but he’s also too immature to have put thought into what he might actually do if a willing girl showed up naked on his doorstep. Girls are still things of fantasy; dealing with them as sexual beings in and of themselves is uncomfortable if not just icky. Bay may be most like Lincoln Six Echo, Ewan McGregor’s character from The Island. He likes Scarlett Johansson obviously and from the very beginning, but because he’s a clone, his sex drive and knowledge of the act has been completely removed, so his attraction to her remains stunted and chaste for most of the film’s run time. He literally doesn’t know what sex is, which seems to be the best position for a Bay protagonist to be in (to be fair, McGregor and Johansson do actually have sex by the film’s end, but only right before he leaves her to go blow up some shit, in spite of the fact that she is a better fighter).
There is a slight shift in this in Bay’s last two movies, the first two installments in the probably endless Transformers series. Megan Fox actually gets to fight giant robots, date Shia LaBeouf (apparently she wants that), and care about being in an adult relationship (though by the definitions of the film, that means she wants LaBeouf to say “I love you”). As a counter balance to this nebulous progress, though, she is objectified far more than any other female lead, from being bent over the hood of a car in the first film to being even more bent over a motor cycle in the second one. I could probably write the rest of this column on the downright creepy state of arrested development Bay seems caught in when it comes to relationships, but instead, let’s look at some other signs of his stunted growth.
Michael Bay, like many a rebellious teenage boy, has trouble with authority figures. In Bad Boys, its internal affairs, who apparently wants to investigate our heroes for some vague and never really defined reason. Because this is a Michael Bay movie, the investigation never goes anywhere and what would be investigated is never really defined, but that isn’t really the point. Bay’s movies don’t have plots so much as they have some idea what a plot should look like; they are less concerned with conflict than with the fact that if somebody doesn’t start shooting at somebody soon, things might get boring. And if there’s one thing Bay never wants, it’s for a movie of his to get boring.
In The Rock, the whole plot is set in motion because Ed Harris’ army man decides to take over Alcatraz and hold San Francisco hostage in order to extort the government out of money they didn’t pay to the families of soldiers who died on black ops missions. Sure, Ed Harris takes 80 hostages and threatens to release biological weapons on a huge city to get what he wants, but this is only because Uncle Sam and all the greedy politicians in Washington refused to pay money to the families of dead soldiers. So who is really the bad guy? Also, John Mason (Sean Connery), the man who has the knowledge of Alcatraz needed to stop Harris, is a British spy illegally detained by the government because he knew too much.
In Armageddon, the only reason the world isn’t completely destroyed is because Bay’s heroes are a rag tag bunch of criminals and misfits who just won’t follow the rules, man. At one point, the President orders some general (Keith David, always fun to have around) to detonate the nuke on the asteroid, in spite of the fact that every scientist in the room is saying that will only kill everyone they sent up there and then ensure the destruction of mankind. Fortunately, head of NASA Billy Bob Thornton is a rebel who cuts communications to keep the bomb from detonating. Later, leader of the drill team Harry Stamper (Bruce Willis) has to strangle the shuttle’s pilot (William Fitchner) for a while to keep him from blowing everybody up. The government, in Bay’s view, is full of selfish and stupid bureaucrats who will ruin everyone’s fun unless they are stopped. Even in Pearl Harbor where Bay has to go easy on the government because he’s constrained by reality, the polio-stricken and wheelchair bound Roosevelt has to literally stand up to force his cabinet to realize the severity of the attack.
The final tendency I want to discuss probably seems obvious, yet still needs to be laid out as a consistent aspect of Bay’s films: the “more is always better” approach he takes to making them. One can say a lot of terrible things about Bay’s movies, and I have, but the charge it is most difficult to levy against him is that his movies are boring (with the exception of Pearl Harbor, because Jesus that movie is long and boring). His movies are over-stuffed with action to the point of sheer gluttony. The Island plays out like a two hour long chase scene, with barely enough time for exposition between all of the car chases and exploding helicopters. Before things even really get going in The Rock (which is my pick, if forced, for Bay’s best movie, a nearly meaningless distinction akin to picking out the rotting food that tastes the best) we have an attack on a military base, a bomb scare, and an insane and ridiculously long car chase through the streets of San Francisco that has so little to do with the actual plot, it might have been thrown in there because Bay realized the movie would be too short without it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-PCs8V7nLg
Michael Bay is so successful, in my estimation, not because he makes good movies (he clearly doesn’t) but because he makes consistent movies. When a Michael Bay movie is released, if you go to see it you know exactly what you’ll get. You know there won’t be any plot to speak of, sure, but you also know you’ll see scantily clad women, gun fights, car chases, and explosions. And perhaps just as importantly, you know you’ll see A LOT of all of that. Bay makes terrible movies, and though I’ve never met the man personally, an analysis of his work tells me he’s probably not a great human being. He’s immature, simplistic, misogynistic, shallow, and by all measures, a hack but his movies are absolutely and completely his. The mind behind Armageddon, Bad Boys, The Island, and Transformers may be a simple one, but what it puts up on the screens is a personal expression, whether we like it or not. Michael Bay’s movies have personality, even though that personality is one that I fervently dislike and wish didn’t exist. I don’t love any of his movies (though I can definitely say that some are more enjoyable than others), but I see why so many people do. You know what you’re going to get when you see a Michael Bay movie, and he delivers it so consistently, it is impossible not to consider the man an auteur.
Read more Whose Film Is It Anyway? here
Coming up on Who's Film Is It Anyway?:
Note: Whose Film Is It Anyway? will go on indefinite hiatus after these final three installments.
4/10:Aaron Sorkin
4/24: Christopher Nolan
5/8: Notes on the Auteur Theory in 2011
Want to keep tabs on all of our updates? follow us on twitter @reviewtobenamed (follow us here).
Monday, March 14, 2011
Whose Film Is It Anyway?: Hal Ashby
By Jordan
Note: The purpose of Whose Film Is It Anyway? is to examine the validity of the auteur theory through the lens of individual film-makers, taking a look at their bodies of work and highlighting the technical elements, personal style, and thematic consistency of their films. Ultimately, the goal of this column will be to generate a discussion of the merits of auteur theory through examinations of directors widely considered auteurs, analyses of directors whose status as auteurs is more tenuous, and occasional looks at non-directors who may drive the quality and content of their films with more assuredness than the directors they work with.
“I like to watch.”-Chance the Gardener (Peter Sellers), Being There
Often when writing this column, I find myself making arguments for a director’s status as an auteur, even when I was prepared initially to disregard him or her as something less when I first approached their work. James Cameron, for example, is someone in whose work I expected to find little consistency, yet by the time I sat down to write the column, it seemed impossible not to at least make an argument for recurring themes and techniques (and many jokes about his insane richness). One of the best things about writing Whose Film Is It Anyway? has been getting the chance to fill in some cinematic blind spots. Whether watching movies by a director whose work I had never seen before or getting the chance to see some of the movies I’d previously missed from a director I already loved, the column has constantly expanded my cinematic horizons and changed my understanding of film.
I am getting ahead of myself with this retrospective, to be sure, and you can look for a lot more like this when this column reaches its (temporary) end in May, yet I bring all of this up by way of introduction for the director we will be examining this week: Hal Ashby. When I was preparing this column, filling my Netflix queue with Ashby’s work, I had already seen two of his movies, Harold and Maude and Being There, and the strength of those was enough to have me excited for what was to come. Having now seen over half of his movies, I can say with some confidence that I wasn’t missing much. Not only did I not enjoy most of his films all that much, I found very little connective tissue between his works. As I said above, I can usually at least mount an argument for a director’s thematic consistency if I look hard enough, yet Ashby offered precious little by way of constancy. The closest I can come to finding a pet theme is his depiction of male sexuality in both its destructive and redemptive forms, but even that seems more like an accident of the times he was working than a dedicated examination by an artist fully in control of his works.
Ashby leaps from theme to theme and from technical style to technical style so fluidly he almost perfectly encapsulates a chameleon behind the camera. From one perspective that can be seen as a talent, and indeed, some might argue that a director putting his personal stamp on his films is just getting in the way of the art. Yet this column is dedicated to the idea that a director is the author of his films, and to date Ashby may be the best argument I’ve found in a director against the auteur theory. To be fair, the theory does not presuppose that every director is an auteur, nor that they should all be considered as such. Ashby lacks the thematic stability, technical style and personal touch required to deem one an auteur, and whether because of this or in spite of it, he often stumbled on his way to making great films.
After spending years working odd jobs around Hollywood, Ashby gained recognition when he won the Oscar for Best Editing for In the Heat of the Night. Leveraging this success into his debut film as a director, Ashby stuck to what had worked for him on that film, examining race relations in America during the period in The Landlord. Widely heralded as a topical “film of its time,” The Landlord follows Elgar Enders (Beau Bridges) as he buys a tenement in Park Slope, Brooklyn with the intent of evicting all of its residents, until he gains affection for the poverty stricken black residents there and rebels against his WASP roots. The film works well enough as an examination of racial attitudes in the late ‘60s, but viewed apart from its political impact, it is poorly paced and often dull. In a recent New York Times article on the movie entitled “Before Gentrification was Cool, It was a Movie,” Mike Hale praised the film for tackling the racial tension ensuing after the death of Martin Luther King Jr. and mentioned that the movie “[…] would disappear after its 1970 release—rarely shown and just as rarely discussed.” At the risk of over-reliance on my critical faculties, I would like to theorize that the film is rarely seen and discussed for no more surprising reason than that it isn’t very good.
Ashby followed up The Landlord with a movie that is so much better it’s hard to even compare the two. Harold and Maude follows the death obsessed young protagonist (Bud Cort) as he meets and becomes enchanted by the elderly Maude (an excellent Ruth Gordon) who teaches him to appreciate his life. The film operates at a level of whimsy that leaves the rest of Asbhy’s work far behind (and always seems to me like a very obvious influence on the work of Wes Anderson) and features an early example of the Manic Pixie Dream girl (and quite possible the oldest incarnation of said character, seeing as Maude is nearing 80 throughout the film), yet it is somehow played with just the right mixture of cloying cuteness and pitch black humor to ensure that it never (ok, rarely) goes over the top. Backed by an excellent soundtrack from Cat Stevens and filled with earned emotions that transcend the “of the times” feel of his previous film, Harold and Maude manages to be a very good film almost in spite of Ashby’s lackluster direction. Roger Ebert, in an incredibly negative review, directly criticized Ashby, saying, “The visual style makes everyone look fresh from the wax museum…” and while I disagree with many of his points about the film, he isn’t wrong here. In a movie that manages to be sweet when by all accounts it should feel saccharine, the direction is easily the film’s weakest point.
After trying on the timely film and a flight of fancy, Ashby moved on to The Last Detail, a dramedy about two Navy sailors, Billy “badass” Buddusky (an Oscar nominated Jack Nicholson) and “Mule” Mulhall (Otis Young) who are assigned to escort Larry Meadows (Randy Quaid, nominated for Best Supporting Actor for the role) to Naval Prison, where he will serve a term of eight years for petty larceny. Along the way, the sailors decide to show Meadows a good time to make up for his unjust sentence, and tomfoolery ensues. Also nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay, The Last Detail can hardly be called a failure, yet again, Ashby’s direction is the lowpoint. Where in Harold and Maude he managed to make everything look about three shades more drab than necessary to make his point, here it appears almost as if he has no point: perhaps this is the movie that taught Kevin Smith how to direct, as the camera, more often than not, is just pointed in a direction likely to capture the action and left alone thereafter.
Ashby next directed Shampoo, a sexual farce that remembers it’s a satire occasionally, but often forgets to add the humor. The film follows George Roundy (Warren Beatty) a Beverly Hills hairdresser who gets around like Don Draper without the charm of the alcohol problems. Set on the eve of the election of Richard Nixon (and released after Watergate had been revealed, giving the film a sense that its setting should mean something, when it is mostly used to give the proceedings the vaguest hint of irony), the film follows George as he tries to avoid settling down with his girlfriend Jill (Goldie Hawn), uses his mistress Felicia (Lee Grant) for access to her wealthy husband Lester (Jack Warden), and then realizes his true love is his ex-girlfriend and Lester’s current mistress Jackie (Julie Christie). It all sounds a great deal more complex and interesting than it appears in execution.
Moving ever forward toward completely different material, Ashby next directed the Woody Guthrie biopic Bound for Glory, notable only for being the first film to utilize Steadicam technology. If you’re thinking that this is an indication of Ashby’s technical capabilities, think again: the Steadicam was invented by cinematographer Garret Brown, who, in association with Director of Photography Haskell Wexler (who won Best Cinematography for his work) gave the film its occasionally dynamic visual style. Bound for Glory is a movie you should see for one of three reasons: 1. You are enough of a film geek to care about the first use of Steadicam, 2. You really love the music of Woody Guthrie, or 3. You are desperately curious what a young David Carradine (who plays Guthrie) looks like. Spoiler alert: he looks a lot like old David Carradine.
Ashby’s greatest film, and the only one for which I can argue his unassuming visual style actually improves the work, is 1979’s Being There. The movie is an arch satire of the self-centered obliviousness of people in power, following a mentally handicapped gardener named Chance (Oscar nominated Peter Sellers in perhaps his best performance) who is cast out of the only home he’s ever known when his previous employer dies. Chance wanders the city until he is hit by a wealthy socialite Eve Rand (Shirley MacClaine) and brought back to her mansion to recover. There, the obliviousness of those around him leaves him mistaken as a wealthy businessman named Chauncey Gardiner, whose simple statements about gardening are often mistaken for wise and insightful allegories about business and life. Chance becomes close with Eve’s wealthy and seriously ill husband Ben (Best Supporting Actor winner Melvyn Douglas), and eventually the President of the United States (Jack Warden) all along the way to accidentally becoming a prominent and well respected member of the American elite. Being There is brilliant, hilarious, and insightful, and Ashby’s simple style actually seems to mirror the way that Chance views the world (though, like his protagonist, I am now left wondering if Ashby stumbled into directing an excellent film because his already unassuming style happened to fit it perfectly).
Following Being There, Ashby fell out of favor in Hollywood, making several more films but receiving little critical attention before his death in 1986. Generally it is fairly easy to determine how well-directed a movie is, yet with Ashby behind the camera, I am often left wondering if any of my favorite directorial moments are actually done with purposefully or if Ashby found his best film by accidentally making one that closely mirrored his style. It would be impossible to call Hal Ashby an auteur, and indeed, even calling him a good director often seems like a stretch. Yet Ashby managed to make two movies I love and happened to be in charge when several other people turned in excellent work, whether it be actors, writers, or cinematographers. Perhaps Hal Ashby’s greatest contribution to film wasn’t Being There. It’s possible, in fact, that his greatest accomplishment was just being there.
Read more Whose Film Is It Anyway? here
Coming up on Who's Film Is It Anyway?:
3/27: Michael Bay
4/10:Aaron Sorkin
4/24: Christopher Nolan
5/8: Notes on the Auteur Theory in 2011
Want to keep tabs on all of our updates? follow us on twitter @reviewtobenamed (follow us here).
Note: The purpose of Whose Film Is It Anyway? is to examine the validity of the auteur theory through the lens of individual film-makers, taking a look at their bodies of work and highlighting the technical elements, personal style, and thematic consistency of their films. Ultimately, the goal of this column will be to generate a discussion of the merits of auteur theory through examinations of directors widely considered auteurs, analyses of directors whose status as auteurs is more tenuous, and occasional looks at non-directors who may drive the quality and content of their films with more assuredness than the directors they work with.
“I like to watch.”-Chance the Gardener (Peter Sellers), Being There
Often when writing this column, I find myself making arguments for a director’s status as an auteur, even when I was prepared initially to disregard him or her as something less when I first approached their work. James Cameron, for example, is someone in whose work I expected to find little consistency, yet by the time I sat down to write the column, it seemed impossible not to at least make an argument for recurring themes and techniques (and many jokes about his insane richness). One of the best things about writing Whose Film Is It Anyway? has been getting the chance to fill in some cinematic blind spots. Whether watching movies by a director whose work I had never seen before or getting the chance to see some of the movies I’d previously missed from a director I already loved, the column has constantly expanded my cinematic horizons and changed my understanding of film.
I am getting ahead of myself with this retrospective, to be sure, and you can look for a lot more like this when this column reaches its (temporary) end in May, yet I bring all of this up by way of introduction for the director we will be examining this week: Hal Ashby. When I was preparing this column, filling my Netflix queue with Ashby’s work, I had already seen two of his movies, Harold and Maude and Being There, and the strength of those was enough to have me excited for what was to come. Having now seen over half of his movies, I can say with some confidence that I wasn’t missing much. Not only did I not enjoy most of his films all that much, I found very little connective tissue between his works. As I said above, I can usually at least mount an argument for a director’s thematic consistency if I look hard enough, yet Ashby offered precious little by way of constancy. The closest I can come to finding a pet theme is his depiction of male sexuality in both its destructive and redemptive forms, but even that seems more like an accident of the times he was working than a dedicated examination by an artist fully in control of his works.
Ashby leaps from theme to theme and from technical style to technical style so fluidly he almost perfectly encapsulates a chameleon behind the camera. From one perspective that can be seen as a talent, and indeed, some might argue that a director putting his personal stamp on his films is just getting in the way of the art. Yet this column is dedicated to the idea that a director is the author of his films, and to date Ashby may be the best argument I’ve found in a director against the auteur theory. To be fair, the theory does not presuppose that every director is an auteur, nor that they should all be considered as such. Ashby lacks the thematic stability, technical style and personal touch required to deem one an auteur, and whether because of this or in spite of it, he often stumbled on his way to making great films.
After spending years working odd jobs around Hollywood, Ashby gained recognition when he won the Oscar for Best Editing for In the Heat of the Night. Leveraging this success into his debut film as a director, Ashby stuck to what had worked for him on that film, examining race relations in America during the period in The Landlord. Widely heralded as a topical “film of its time,” The Landlord follows Elgar Enders (Beau Bridges) as he buys a tenement in Park Slope, Brooklyn with the intent of evicting all of its residents, until he gains affection for the poverty stricken black residents there and rebels against his WASP roots. The film works well enough as an examination of racial attitudes in the late ‘60s, but viewed apart from its political impact, it is poorly paced and often dull. In a recent New York Times article on the movie entitled “Before Gentrification was Cool, It was a Movie,” Mike Hale praised the film for tackling the racial tension ensuing after the death of Martin Luther King Jr. and mentioned that the movie “[…] would disappear after its 1970 release—rarely shown and just as rarely discussed.” At the risk of over-reliance on my critical faculties, I would like to theorize that the film is rarely seen and discussed for no more surprising reason than that it isn’t very good.
Ashby followed up The Landlord with a movie that is so much better it’s hard to even compare the two. Harold and Maude follows the death obsessed young protagonist (Bud Cort) as he meets and becomes enchanted by the elderly Maude (an excellent Ruth Gordon) who teaches him to appreciate his life. The film operates at a level of whimsy that leaves the rest of Asbhy’s work far behind (and always seems to me like a very obvious influence on the work of Wes Anderson) and features an early example of the Manic Pixie Dream girl (and quite possible the oldest incarnation of said character, seeing as Maude is nearing 80 throughout the film), yet it is somehow played with just the right mixture of cloying cuteness and pitch black humor to ensure that it never (ok, rarely) goes over the top. Backed by an excellent soundtrack from Cat Stevens and filled with earned emotions that transcend the “of the times” feel of his previous film, Harold and Maude manages to be a very good film almost in spite of Ashby’s lackluster direction. Roger Ebert, in an incredibly negative review, directly criticized Ashby, saying, “The visual style makes everyone look fresh from the wax museum…” and while I disagree with many of his points about the film, he isn’t wrong here. In a movie that manages to be sweet when by all accounts it should feel saccharine, the direction is easily the film’s weakest point.
After trying on the timely film and a flight of fancy, Ashby moved on to The Last Detail, a dramedy about two Navy sailors, Billy “badass” Buddusky (an Oscar nominated Jack Nicholson) and “Mule” Mulhall (Otis Young) who are assigned to escort Larry Meadows (Randy Quaid, nominated for Best Supporting Actor for the role) to Naval Prison, where he will serve a term of eight years for petty larceny. Along the way, the sailors decide to show Meadows a good time to make up for his unjust sentence, and tomfoolery ensues. Also nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay, The Last Detail can hardly be called a failure, yet again, Ashby’s direction is the lowpoint. Where in Harold and Maude he managed to make everything look about three shades more drab than necessary to make his point, here it appears almost as if he has no point: perhaps this is the movie that taught Kevin Smith how to direct, as the camera, more often than not, is just pointed in a direction likely to capture the action and left alone thereafter.
Ashby next directed Shampoo, a sexual farce that remembers it’s a satire occasionally, but often forgets to add the humor. The film follows George Roundy (Warren Beatty) a Beverly Hills hairdresser who gets around like Don Draper without the charm of the alcohol problems. Set on the eve of the election of Richard Nixon (and released after Watergate had been revealed, giving the film a sense that its setting should mean something, when it is mostly used to give the proceedings the vaguest hint of irony), the film follows George as he tries to avoid settling down with his girlfriend Jill (Goldie Hawn), uses his mistress Felicia (Lee Grant) for access to her wealthy husband Lester (Jack Warden), and then realizes his true love is his ex-girlfriend and Lester’s current mistress Jackie (Julie Christie). It all sounds a great deal more complex and interesting than it appears in execution.
Moving ever forward toward completely different material, Ashby next directed the Woody Guthrie biopic Bound for Glory, notable only for being the first film to utilize Steadicam technology. If you’re thinking that this is an indication of Ashby’s technical capabilities, think again: the Steadicam was invented by cinematographer Garret Brown, who, in association with Director of Photography Haskell Wexler (who won Best Cinematography for his work) gave the film its occasionally dynamic visual style. Bound for Glory is a movie you should see for one of three reasons: 1. You are enough of a film geek to care about the first use of Steadicam, 2. You really love the music of Woody Guthrie, or 3. You are desperately curious what a young David Carradine (who plays Guthrie) looks like. Spoiler alert: he looks a lot like old David Carradine.
Ashby’s greatest film, and the only one for which I can argue his unassuming visual style actually improves the work, is 1979’s Being There. The movie is an arch satire of the self-centered obliviousness of people in power, following a mentally handicapped gardener named Chance (Oscar nominated Peter Sellers in perhaps his best performance) who is cast out of the only home he’s ever known when his previous employer dies. Chance wanders the city until he is hit by a wealthy socialite Eve Rand (Shirley MacClaine) and brought back to her mansion to recover. There, the obliviousness of those around him leaves him mistaken as a wealthy businessman named Chauncey Gardiner, whose simple statements about gardening are often mistaken for wise and insightful allegories about business and life. Chance becomes close with Eve’s wealthy and seriously ill husband Ben (Best Supporting Actor winner Melvyn Douglas), and eventually the President of the United States (Jack Warden) all along the way to accidentally becoming a prominent and well respected member of the American elite. Being There is brilliant, hilarious, and insightful, and Ashby’s simple style actually seems to mirror the way that Chance views the world (though, like his protagonist, I am now left wondering if Ashby stumbled into directing an excellent film because his already unassuming style happened to fit it perfectly).
Following Being There, Ashby fell out of favor in Hollywood, making several more films but receiving little critical attention before his death in 1986. Generally it is fairly easy to determine how well-directed a movie is, yet with Ashby behind the camera, I am often left wondering if any of my favorite directorial moments are actually done with purposefully or if Ashby found his best film by accidentally making one that closely mirrored his style. It would be impossible to call Hal Ashby an auteur, and indeed, even calling him a good director often seems like a stretch. Yet Ashby managed to make two movies I love and happened to be in charge when several other people turned in excellent work, whether it be actors, writers, or cinematographers. Perhaps Hal Ashby’s greatest contribution to film wasn’t Being There. It’s possible, in fact, that his greatest accomplishment was just being there.
Read more Whose Film Is It Anyway? here
Coming up on Who's Film Is It Anyway?:
3/27: Michael Bay
4/10:Aaron Sorkin
4/24: Christopher Nolan
5/8: Notes on the Auteur Theory in 2011
Want to keep tabs on all of our updates? follow us on twitter @reviewtobenamed (follow us here).
Sunday, February 27, 2011
Whose Film Is It Anyway?: Quentin Tarantino
By Jordan
Note: The purpose of Whose Film Is It Anyway? is to examine the validity of the auteur theory through the lens of individual film-makers, taking a look at their bodies of work and highlighting the technical elements, personal style, and thematic consistency of their films. Ultimately, the goal of this column will be to generate a discussion of the merits of auteur theory through examinations of directors widely considered auteurs, analyses of directors whose status as auteurs is more tenuous, and occasional looks at non-directors who may drive the quality and content of their films with more assuredness than the directors they work with.
“The violent intensity of Pulp Fiction calls to mind other violent watershed films that were considered classics in their time and still are. Hitchcock's Psycho [1960], Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde [1967], and Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange [1971]. Each film shook up a tired, bloated movie industry and used a world of lively lowlifes to reflect how dull other movies had become. And that, I predict, will be the ultimate honor for Pulp Fiction. Like all great films, it criticizes other movies.”-Gene Siskel
“I steal from every movie ever made.”-Quentin Tarantino
In the 1970’s, widely considered the best decade in cinema, a wave of directors appeared on the scene who changed everything. Quickly gaining great freedom in Hollywood to make movies that fit with their own personal views and pet themes (this was helped by the death knells of the traditional studio system), this generation of directors, this batch of auteurs, are collectively known as the film school brats. Scorsese, Coppola,Lucas, Spielberg and several others emerged from film schools in the late ‘60s and by the early ‘70s were making movies that permanently changed the face of cinema. However, there is a law of physics that tells us for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction, and while this column doesn’t set out to make the argument that this always holds true in Hollywood, I think there is a certain potency in the view that the video store brats of the early 1990’s can be seen as the equal and opposite reaction to the film school brats. Robert Rodriguez, Allison Anders, and Kevin Smith are all members of this cadre. Yet the reason the video store brats can even be counted within the same league as the film school brats is a pretty simple one. It’s because the most acclaimed of the video store brats is Quentin Tarantino.
There is an argument to be made that Tarantino has influenced film in the last two decades more than any other single director. Think of all of the Tarantino-lite fare that has been released since Pulp Fiction. Most of the Tarantino “inspired” movies are little more than rehashes of his style that ape his pop-culture hyper-literacy, banter heavy dialogue, and ultra-violence. I can’t imagine Tarantino minds this phenomenon too much, though, as he freely admits that all of his own movies are giant homages to the films and the genres that he loves.
Tarantino’s first film, Reservoir Dogs, was widely seen as a sea change in American cinema. At the time of its release, Jami Bernard of the New York Daily News compared it to L’Arrive d’un Train en Gare de la Ciotat, the 1895 film that depicted a train coming at the camera and lead audiences to scream and scatter in fear. In short, he said, “I don’t think people were ready for it.” His use of non-linear storytelling, strong language and graphic violence shocked viewers and raised expectations immeasurably for the quality and verve of independent cinema. The film follows the planning and botched execution of a diamond heist by six “nameless” criminals, using colors as aliases, a crime lord (Lawrence Tierney), and his rough edged son Eddie (Chris Penn). After a brief introduction to the gang as they eat breakfast before pulling the job, the film leaps immediately to the bloody aftermath, with Mr. Orange (Tim Roth) gutshot in the backseat of a car being driven by the sympathetic Mr. White (Harvey Keitel). The two head to a safehouse, where they are joined by the paranoid Mr. Pink (Steve Buscemi) who believes that one of them is a rat. As the men try to determine who among their numbers betrayed them, the film jumps back and forth to the formation of the group, the planning of the heist, and the histories of some of the people involved.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awGkBWTlZPE&feature=fvwrel
Heralded as blazingly original and the arrival of a completely unique cinematic voice at the time of its release, Tarantino quickly, and often, rattled off numerous influences to the film that shaped the characters, the style, and the story. He says it was most directly influenced by Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing, calling Reservoir Dogs, “…my Killing, my take on that kind of heist movie.” Tarantino has also listed Kansas City Confidential (in which an undercover cop has infiltrated a heist), The Big Combo (in which a cop is tortured while tied to a chair), and the original version of The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (in which the people involved in the crime name themselves after colors to preserve anonymity). The title is also theorized to be a reference to Louis Malle’s Au Revoir Les Enfants and to Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs. In spite of all its filmic antecedents, Reservoir Dogs is still completely infused with Tarantino’s flourishes, from the banter between the characters to the ‘70s heavy soundtrack, and manages to be a film that is in many ways greater than the sum of its parts.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=monNMsQyfCE&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mCfzQOyANk&feature=fvwrel
While showing Reservoir Dogs at a variety of European film festivals, Tarantino began work on his next screenplay, which he hoped would be a movie version of the hardboiled crime fiction magazine Black Mask, aiming to tell three stories that would fit into the crime fiction genre with a hardboiled pulp feel. Originally, Tarantino was to write one story, his friend Roger Avary was to write a second, and an unknown third director would write a third. The three would then each shoot their story and create an anthology film. This idea was quickly abandoned when a third voice never materialized and both Tarantino and Avary’s stories became longer than was intended. Tarantino described his intent with the film thusly: “the idea was basically to take the oldest chestnuts you’ve ever seen when it comes to crime stories—the oldest stories in the book.” What emerged from this exercise was Pulp Fiction, which would win Tarantino and Avary Oscars for Best Original Screenplay and would change movies for the foreseeable future.
Pulp Fiction is centered around three classic crime fiction stories: the idea of the heavy (John Travolta, who was nominated for Best Actor and had a major comeback due to the film) taking out the boss’ wife (Uma Thurman, who was nominated for Best Supporting Actrss), the idea of the boxer (Bruce Willis) paid to take the fall in a fight, and the idea of two hitmen (Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson, who as nominated for Best Supporting Actor) taking on a seemingly simple task. Tarantino cites Kiss Me Deadly, a short film called Curdled,Jean-Luc Godard's Bande a Parte (which was also the inspiration for the name of his production company, A Band Apart) and dozens of other films as inspiration. Yet Tarantino’s non-linear storytelling, predilection for letting these venerable tropes of crime fiction veer off the established rails, use of surf-rock and ‘70s tunes, and pop-culture savvy dialogue are the real legacies of Pulp Fiction, inspiring legions of imitators.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRVm_TAE24A
Following the widespread success and critical praise of Pulp Fiction, Tarantino wanted to adapt the work of another, both to alleviate the pressure of following up what some were calling a masterpiece, and to put his own touches on the work of another. He adapted Elmore Leonard’s Rum Punch, changing the race of the main character and creating a noir movie that also commented on the conventions of blaxploitation. The result, 1997’s Jackie Brown, follows the titular smuggler (Pam Grier) as she plans to play her gun-running boss Ordell (Samuel L. Jackson) against the ATF and agent Ray Nicolette (Michael Keaton) to talk away with $500,000 of smuggled money. With the help of an infatuated bail bondsman (Robert Forster) and working against some of Ordell’s heavies (including Robert De Niro), Jackie plays both sides against each other in an increasingly elaborate game of cat and mouse.
Inspired by Leonard’s novel, as well as many blaxploitation films, especially those actually starring Pam Grier (including Black Mama, White Mama, Coffy, and Foxy Brown) and even including an opening homage to The Graduate, Jackie Brown continues to be Tarantino’s least appreciated and referenced movie, which leaves the film criminally underrated. Smart, savvy, complex and flat-out fun, Jackie Brown is certainly Tarantino’s most straight forward film to date, yet it still retains his artful touches.
Tarantino has spent the last decade exploring the genres he most loves exceedingly closely, making films that can at times seem more like long-form homages than blazingly original works, yet he has never lost the ability to make his movies his own. Kill Bill, his fourth film (and his fifth, if you consider the cleaved movie two separate films) is at heart his most epic homage, a four hour love letter to the revenge drama that is heavily influenced by the traditions of Hong Kong martial arts films, Spaghetti Westerns, Japanese Chanbara films and exploitation movies. The movie follows the vengeful quest of The Bride (Uma Thurman) an assassin left for dead on her wedding day by her ex-lover Bill (David Carradine) and his cabal of assassins, who awakens from a coma four years later and sets out to take bloody vengeance on those who tried to kill her. The film(s) follow her gore-filled quest for revenge in a (who’s surprised) non-linear fashion as she tracks down and dispatches Vernita Green (Vivica A. Fox), O-Ren Ishii (Lucy Liu), Budd (Michael Madsen) and Elle Driver (Daryl Hannah) all on her path to finally coming face to face with the love of her life and the man who tried to murder her, the shockingly sympathetic and intuitive Bill.
Directly inspired by Lady Snowblood (which follows a woman murdering the gang that killed her family), the film also contains direct references to Samurai Reincarnation, Kage no Gundan, and Shogun Assassin, as well as more subtle homages to en grym film, Jackass: The Movie, Grease and dozens of others. At the core of the movie, though, is Tarantino’s deeply felt passion for the character, his pop-culture sensibility, his musical taste, and his nigh-magical way with words.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mo8ZM7PyRzU
Tarantino followed Kill Bill with his most direct homage yet: Grindhouse, a double feature anthology he co-directed with Robert Rodriguez as a mainstream re-creation of the run down nature of B-movies and the theaters that the two had frequented as kids. As such, both halves of the film (Rodriguez’ zombie movie Planet Terror and Tarantino’s vehicular slasher flick Death Proof) are shot on grainy film, contain missing reels, and are generally written and performed to evoke the poor production values of the exploitation movies of the ‘70s.
Tarantino’s half of the film, Death Proof, tells of a deranged stuntman (Kurt Russell) who stalks women and murders them by causing car crashes, which he is sure to survive because he has made his car “death proof.” Tarantino structured the movie on slasher films, but did not want to make a direct slasher film because of the rigid rules of the genre. So instead he used the basic plot points to create something different, a film about a misogynist that becomes a triumphant celebration of feminism by its closing shot.
Following Grindhouse, which was critically acclaimed but did poorly at the box office, Tarantino finally put into production the screenplay he had been working on for over a decade: Inglourious Basterds. A World War II epic more satisfyingly read as a Tarantino treatise on how he makes his films, the movie includes references to all of his previous works in addition to having as its thesis the idea that cinema can completely reform the world, changing history and our perceptions for at least the run-time of a great movie. Ostensibly following the titular band of Jewish soldiers turned ruthless Nazi hunters, lead by Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) and including BJ Novak, Eli Roth, and Samm Levine, the film quickly becomes more of an espionage thriller than a war film as The Basterds, with the help of a British spy (Michael Fassbender) and a German double Agent (Diane Kruger) aim to use the premiere of a new German film as a chance to assassinate the German High Command, including Joseph Goebbels (Sylvester Groth) and Hitler himself (Martin Wuttke). As they prepare to execute their plan, a similar effort to destroy the attendees of the premiere is being plotted by an escaped Jew who owns the cinema under an assumed identity (Melanie Laurent) and her lover (Jacky Ido). However, each plan may be foiled by the brilliant, seductively evil Nazi “Jew Hunter” Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz, who won Best Supporting Actor for his seductively sinister, linguistically acrobatic performance) who seems constantly a few steps ahead of his adversaries.
Where each of Tarantino’s previous films heavily references cinematic history, Inglourious Basterds focuses more heavily on referencing the way that Tarantino himself makes movies. His tendency towards pop-culture references, ‘70’s music and non-linear storytelling are all given attention, and he directly references each of his own films within the movie. Perhaps most telling, then, is the film’s last line, when Aldo Raine looks right into the camera and says, “This just might be my masterpiece.”
Tarantino has built his career on his near encyclopedic knowledge of film history and his ability to rework and recycle the best of genre fare, yet his true success as a filmmaker comes from his ability to make what he “steals” his own. While Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown, Kill Bill, Grindhouse, and Inglourious Basterds all owe huge debts to movies that came before, none of them are as excellent as they are because of the movies they reference. Each has a distinct sensibility, and a unique sense of humor that belongs to Tarantino alone. Like many people of the generation in which Tarantino came of age (and in subsequent generations, including my own), the world is best viewed through the lens of pop culture. Yet using the realm as a looking glass into the world at large need not distort one’s individual voice and perspective. Rather, in Tarantino’s case, it appears to have magnified that distinct authorial voice, and helped to cement him as one of the most influential and important filmmakers of our time.
Read more Whose Film Is It Anyway? here
Coming up on Who's Film Is It Anyway?:
3/13: Hal Ashby
3/27: Michael Bay
4/10:Aaron Sorkin
4/24: Christopher Nolan
Want to keep tabs on all of our updates? follow us on twitter @reviewtobenamed (follow us here).
Note: The purpose of Whose Film Is It Anyway? is to examine the validity of the auteur theory through the lens of individual film-makers, taking a look at their bodies of work and highlighting the technical elements, personal style, and thematic consistency of their films. Ultimately, the goal of this column will be to generate a discussion of the merits of auteur theory through examinations of directors widely considered auteurs, analyses of directors whose status as auteurs is more tenuous, and occasional looks at non-directors who may drive the quality and content of their films with more assuredness than the directors they work with.
“The violent intensity of Pulp Fiction calls to mind other violent watershed films that were considered classics in their time and still are. Hitchcock's Psycho [1960], Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde [1967], and Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange [1971]. Each film shook up a tired, bloated movie industry and used a world of lively lowlifes to reflect how dull other movies had become. And that, I predict, will be the ultimate honor for Pulp Fiction. Like all great films, it criticizes other movies.”-Gene Siskel
“I steal from every movie ever made.”-Quentin Tarantino
In the 1970’s, widely considered the best decade in cinema, a wave of directors appeared on the scene who changed everything. Quickly gaining great freedom in Hollywood to make movies that fit with their own personal views and pet themes (this was helped by the death knells of the traditional studio system), this generation of directors, this batch of auteurs, are collectively known as the film school brats. Scorsese, Coppola,Lucas, Spielberg and several others emerged from film schools in the late ‘60s and by the early ‘70s were making movies that permanently changed the face of cinema. However, there is a law of physics that tells us for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction, and while this column doesn’t set out to make the argument that this always holds true in Hollywood, I think there is a certain potency in the view that the video store brats of the early 1990’s can be seen as the equal and opposite reaction to the film school brats. Robert Rodriguez, Allison Anders, and Kevin Smith are all members of this cadre. Yet the reason the video store brats can even be counted within the same league as the film school brats is a pretty simple one. It’s because the most acclaimed of the video store brats is Quentin Tarantino.
There is an argument to be made that Tarantino has influenced film in the last two decades more than any other single director. Think of all of the Tarantino-lite fare that has been released since Pulp Fiction. Most of the Tarantino “inspired” movies are little more than rehashes of his style that ape his pop-culture hyper-literacy, banter heavy dialogue, and ultra-violence. I can’t imagine Tarantino minds this phenomenon too much, though, as he freely admits that all of his own movies are giant homages to the films and the genres that he loves.
Tarantino’s first film, Reservoir Dogs, was widely seen as a sea change in American cinema. At the time of its release, Jami Bernard of the New York Daily News compared it to L’Arrive d’un Train en Gare de la Ciotat, the 1895 film that depicted a train coming at the camera and lead audiences to scream and scatter in fear. In short, he said, “I don’t think people were ready for it.” His use of non-linear storytelling, strong language and graphic violence shocked viewers and raised expectations immeasurably for the quality and verve of independent cinema. The film follows the planning and botched execution of a diamond heist by six “nameless” criminals, using colors as aliases, a crime lord (Lawrence Tierney), and his rough edged son Eddie (Chris Penn). After a brief introduction to the gang as they eat breakfast before pulling the job, the film leaps immediately to the bloody aftermath, with Mr. Orange (Tim Roth) gutshot in the backseat of a car being driven by the sympathetic Mr. White (Harvey Keitel). The two head to a safehouse, where they are joined by the paranoid Mr. Pink (Steve Buscemi) who believes that one of them is a rat. As the men try to determine who among their numbers betrayed them, the film jumps back and forth to the formation of the group, the planning of the heist, and the histories of some of the people involved.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awGkBWTlZPE&feature=fvwrel
Heralded as blazingly original and the arrival of a completely unique cinematic voice at the time of its release, Tarantino quickly, and often, rattled off numerous influences to the film that shaped the characters, the style, and the story. He says it was most directly influenced by Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing, calling Reservoir Dogs, “…my Killing, my take on that kind of heist movie.” Tarantino has also listed Kansas City Confidential (in which an undercover cop has infiltrated a heist), The Big Combo (in which a cop is tortured while tied to a chair), and the original version of The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (in which the people involved in the crime name themselves after colors to preserve anonymity). The title is also theorized to be a reference to Louis Malle’s Au Revoir Les Enfants and to Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs. In spite of all its filmic antecedents, Reservoir Dogs is still completely infused with Tarantino’s flourishes, from the banter between the characters to the ‘70s heavy soundtrack, and manages to be a film that is in many ways greater than the sum of its parts.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=monNMsQyfCE&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mCfzQOyANk&feature=fvwrel
While showing Reservoir Dogs at a variety of European film festivals, Tarantino began work on his next screenplay, which he hoped would be a movie version of the hardboiled crime fiction magazine Black Mask, aiming to tell three stories that would fit into the crime fiction genre with a hardboiled pulp feel. Originally, Tarantino was to write one story, his friend Roger Avary was to write a second, and an unknown third director would write a third. The three would then each shoot their story and create an anthology film. This idea was quickly abandoned when a third voice never materialized and both Tarantino and Avary’s stories became longer than was intended. Tarantino described his intent with the film thusly: “the idea was basically to take the oldest chestnuts you’ve ever seen when it comes to crime stories—the oldest stories in the book.” What emerged from this exercise was Pulp Fiction, which would win Tarantino and Avary Oscars for Best Original Screenplay and would change movies for the foreseeable future.
Pulp Fiction is centered around three classic crime fiction stories: the idea of the heavy (John Travolta, who was nominated for Best Actor and had a major comeback due to the film) taking out the boss’ wife (Uma Thurman, who was nominated for Best Supporting Actrss), the idea of the boxer (Bruce Willis) paid to take the fall in a fight, and the idea of two hitmen (Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson, who as nominated for Best Supporting Actor) taking on a seemingly simple task. Tarantino cites Kiss Me Deadly, a short film called Curdled,Jean-Luc Godard's Bande a Parte (which was also the inspiration for the name of his production company, A Band Apart) and dozens of other films as inspiration. Yet Tarantino’s non-linear storytelling, predilection for letting these venerable tropes of crime fiction veer off the established rails, use of surf-rock and ‘70s tunes, and pop-culture savvy dialogue are the real legacies of Pulp Fiction, inspiring legions of imitators.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRVm_TAE24A
Following the widespread success and critical praise of Pulp Fiction, Tarantino wanted to adapt the work of another, both to alleviate the pressure of following up what some were calling a masterpiece, and to put his own touches on the work of another. He adapted Elmore Leonard’s Rum Punch, changing the race of the main character and creating a noir movie that also commented on the conventions of blaxploitation. The result, 1997’s Jackie Brown, follows the titular smuggler (Pam Grier) as she plans to play her gun-running boss Ordell (Samuel L. Jackson) against the ATF and agent Ray Nicolette (Michael Keaton) to talk away with $500,000 of smuggled money. With the help of an infatuated bail bondsman (Robert Forster) and working against some of Ordell’s heavies (including Robert De Niro), Jackie plays both sides against each other in an increasingly elaborate game of cat and mouse.
Inspired by Leonard’s novel, as well as many blaxploitation films, especially those actually starring Pam Grier (including Black Mama, White Mama, Coffy, and Foxy Brown) and even including an opening homage to The Graduate, Jackie Brown continues to be Tarantino’s least appreciated and referenced movie, which leaves the film criminally underrated. Smart, savvy, complex and flat-out fun, Jackie Brown is certainly Tarantino’s most straight forward film to date, yet it still retains his artful touches.
Tarantino has spent the last decade exploring the genres he most loves exceedingly closely, making films that can at times seem more like long-form homages than blazingly original works, yet he has never lost the ability to make his movies his own. Kill Bill, his fourth film (and his fifth, if you consider the cleaved movie two separate films) is at heart his most epic homage, a four hour love letter to the revenge drama that is heavily influenced by the traditions of Hong Kong martial arts films, Spaghetti Westerns, Japanese Chanbara films and exploitation movies. The movie follows the vengeful quest of The Bride (Uma Thurman) an assassin left for dead on her wedding day by her ex-lover Bill (David Carradine) and his cabal of assassins, who awakens from a coma four years later and sets out to take bloody vengeance on those who tried to kill her. The film(s) follow her gore-filled quest for revenge in a (who’s surprised) non-linear fashion as she tracks down and dispatches Vernita Green (Vivica A. Fox), O-Ren Ishii (Lucy Liu), Budd (Michael Madsen) and Elle Driver (Daryl Hannah) all on her path to finally coming face to face with the love of her life and the man who tried to murder her, the shockingly sympathetic and intuitive Bill.
Directly inspired by Lady Snowblood (which follows a woman murdering the gang that killed her family), the film also contains direct references to Samurai Reincarnation, Kage no Gundan, and Shogun Assassin, as well as more subtle homages to en grym film, Jackass: The Movie, Grease and dozens of others. At the core of the movie, though, is Tarantino’s deeply felt passion for the character, his pop-culture sensibility, his musical taste, and his nigh-magical way with words.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mo8ZM7PyRzU
Tarantino followed Kill Bill with his most direct homage yet: Grindhouse, a double feature anthology he co-directed with Robert Rodriguez as a mainstream re-creation of the run down nature of B-movies and the theaters that the two had frequented as kids. As such, both halves of the film (Rodriguez’ zombie movie Planet Terror and Tarantino’s vehicular slasher flick Death Proof) are shot on grainy film, contain missing reels, and are generally written and performed to evoke the poor production values of the exploitation movies of the ‘70s.
Tarantino’s half of the film, Death Proof, tells of a deranged stuntman (Kurt Russell) who stalks women and murders them by causing car crashes, which he is sure to survive because he has made his car “death proof.” Tarantino structured the movie on slasher films, but did not want to make a direct slasher film because of the rigid rules of the genre. So instead he used the basic plot points to create something different, a film about a misogynist that becomes a triumphant celebration of feminism by its closing shot.
Following Grindhouse, which was critically acclaimed but did poorly at the box office, Tarantino finally put into production the screenplay he had been working on for over a decade: Inglourious Basterds. A World War II epic more satisfyingly read as a Tarantino treatise on how he makes his films, the movie includes references to all of his previous works in addition to having as its thesis the idea that cinema can completely reform the world, changing history and our perceptions for at least the run-time of a great movie. Ostensibly following the titular band of Jewish soldiers turned ruthless Nazi hunters, lead by Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) and including BJ Novak, Eli Roth, and Samm Levine, the film quickly becomes more of an espionage thriller than a war film as The Basterds, with the help of a British spy (Michael Fassbender) and a German double Agent (Diane Kruger) aim to use the premiere of a new German film as a chance to assassinate the German High Command, including Joseph Goebbels (Sylvester Groth) and Hitler himself (Martin Wuttke). As they prepare to execute their plan, a similar effort to destroy the attendees of the premiere is being plotted by an escaped Jew who owns the cinema under an assumed identity (Melanie Laurent) and her lover (Jacky Ido). However, each plan may be foiled by the brilliant, seductively evil Nazi “Jew Hunter” Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz, who won Best Supporting Actor for his seductively sinister, linguistically acrobatic performance) who seems constantly a few steps ahead of his adversaries.
Where each of Tarantino’s previous films heavily references cinematic history, Inglourious Basterds focuses more heavily on referencing the way that Tarantino himself makes movies. His tendency towards pop-culture references, ‘70’s music and non-linear storytelling are all given attention, and he directly references each of his own films within the movie. Perhaps most telling, then, is the film’s last line, when Aldo Raine looks right into the camera and says, “This just might be my masterpiece.”
Tarantino has built his career on his near encyclopedic knowledge of film history and his ability to rework and recycle the best of genre fare, yet his true success as a filmmaker comes from his ability to make what he “steals” his own. While Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown, Kill Bill, Grindhouse, and Inglourious Basterds all owe huge debts to movies that came before, none of them are as excellent as they are because of the movies they reference. Each has a distinct sensibility, and a unique sense of humor that belongs to Tarantino alone. Like many people of the generation in which Tarantino came of age (and in subsequent generations, including my own), the world is best viewed through the lens of pop culture. Yet using the realm as a looking glass into the world at large need not distort one’s individual voice and perspective. Rather, in Tarantino’s case, it appears to have magnified that distinct authorial voice, and helped to cement him as one of the most influential and important filmmakers of our time.
Read more Whose Film Is It Anyway? here
Coming up on Who's Film Is It Anyway?:
3/13: Hal Ashby
3/27: Michael Bay
4/10:Aaron Sorkin
4/24: Christopher Nolan
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Sunday, February 13, 2011
Whose Film Is It Anyway?: George Lucas
By Jordan
Note: The purpose of Whose Film Is It Anyway? is to examine the validity of the auteur theory through the lens of individual film-makers, taking a look at their bodies of work and highlighting the technical elements, personal style, and thematic consistency of their films. Ultimately, the goal of this column will be to generate a discussion of the merits of auteur theory through examinations of directors widely considered auteurs, analyses of directors whose status as auteurs is more tenuous, and occasional looks at non-directors who may drive the quality and content of their films with more assuredness than the directors they work with.
“Do or do not. There is no try.”-Yoda (Frank Oz), The Empire Strikes Back
George Lucas changed the face of the film industry vastly, permanently, and entirely. But probably not in the way you think, and not always for the better. Over a career that has now spanned 40 years, he directed just six movies, and wrote only four by himself (though he had co-writers on three others, bringing his screenplay count up to seven). He has been vastly more productive as a producer and as a creative force than he ever will be as a writer or a director. And while it’s possible, and even easy to lob criticisms at him as a terrible writer and a director who peaked years before his most famous film, no one can claim that he isn’t a visionary as an idea man.
The way he reshaped the film industry has little to do with this though, at least on the surface. Saying that George Lucas invented the independent film scene as we now know it is slightly inaccurate (there were independent films before him that followed a model more similar to the way they are made today than what he pioneered), yet in the way that really matter, George Lucas invented the independent film scene. By the time of his second feature as a director, 1973’s American Graffiti (which we will talk about in a moment), he had already created Lucasfilm, the production company that would release one of the biggest films of all time on its own just four years later. George Lucas made Star Wars (or, as its now more popularly known, Star Wars: Episode IV: A New Hope), a big budget smash hit, completely outside of the studio system.
You know what else George Lucas did that completely and inexorably altered the movie-making landscape? He invented the now completely inseparable idea of merchandising for his movies. As he put it himself, “I figured if I got posters and T-shirts and things with the name of the movie on it, it would help promote the movie. The whole idea that licensing would be a revenue stream didn't occur to anybody.” Every time you slept in your Star Wars sheets as a kid (or, for some of you, as a slightly embarrassing adult), every time you laughed at Yogurt’s schtick in Spaceballs, and pretty much every poster that was probably hanging in your room as a kid, even the ones that on the surface had nothing to do with George Lucas, really only exist because of George Lucas. Add to that what THX has done to improve the sound in movie theaters, making itself an omnipresent force nationwide (though the current incarnation has nothing to do with Lucas, it was developed by Lucasfilm to ensure that the fidelity of the sound in Return of the Jedi would be of high quality across the country), and the groundbreaking work both on the Star Wars films and in general contributed to special effects by ILM (Industrial Light & Magic), and George Lucas becomes one of the most instrumental forces in our entire conception of modern cinema.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvmZ9SPcTzU
But taking a step back, for a moment, to look at Lucas as a filmmaker, you’ll notice that his body of work is miniscule, and a full half of his movies as a writer and as a director are, too put it mildly, worse than two Holocausts. It wasn’t always that way, though. When THX 1138 was released in 1971, people pretty much just thought it was worse than a small Eastern European genocide. The film was produced by Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola based on a short film Lucas had made while in film school at USC. When the duo brought the finished film to Warner Bros, who had recently loaned Coppola $300,000 to open his own studio, American Zoetrope, Warner Bros. wanted their money back, and forced Lucas to cut down the film before its release. The debt that THX 1138 put American Zoetrope in forced Coppola to reluctantly take on another project to keep his studio afloat. And that unenthusiastic project would grow up to be The Godfather. For those of you keeping score at home, that means that in addition to being responsible for the flaming abortion that is the prequel trilogy, George Lucas also unwittingly brought us The Godfather. Sure, he re-edited his movies so Greedo shoots first and Jabba the Hutt has terrible musical taste, but his blunders also brought us Marlon Brando and Robert De Niro’s incendiary portrayals of Vito Corleone (I’m conjecturing here, that if Coppola hadn’t made The Godfather, he never would have made Part II, which I think a fair assumption). Where does that leave Lucas karmically? This is a question that will probably keep me up nights.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6Z2ag8FMZw
THX 1138 was far from a commercial success (though it did recoup its budget), and was critically dismissed at the time (though it did receive fairly good reviews), which is kind of surprising considering its easily Lucas’ best directed film. It follows the titular THX (Robert Duvall) on his quest to escape the strictures of his totalitarian society where love is prohibited and free thinking greatly discouraged. In Lucas’ mind, it seems, the distant past was a time of enlightenment when good could triumph over evil (let’s not forget, fellow film geeks, that Star Wars is set “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…”), but the future is a dystopian nightmare where people can’t grow hair, fall in love, or pursue their dreams. This might shed more light on Lucas’ film career than it seems. In his early days, he made a very good sci-fi film that criticized consumerism and mirrored his own personal struggle for artistic freedom in a studio system that wouldn’t allow him to shine. Yet within a decade after the release of THX 1138 he had fallen down the rabbit hole, changing his mind about the original intended death of Han Solo because he worried it might hurt action figure sales. Oh, how the mighty had fallen (by becoming insanely more rich and successful than I can even conceive of, both because he had a lot of money and because counting has never been my greatest strength).
If Star Wars can be viewed as the beginning of Lucas’ artistic death, as the point right before his creative integrity was devoured by his own marketing ingenuity like an Ouroboros of getting rich off of action figures instead of great movies, then American Graffiti can be seen in a whole new light. It exists as Lucas’ second feature, and his last movie within the studio system (it was co-produced by Universal Pictures, in addition to The Coppola Company and the new Lucasfilm), as another example of an assured director gaining confidence along with his experience, and as the point at which cineastes had to stand up and recognize Lucas as a potential filmic force to be reckoned with. It became a sleeper hit commercially and garnered high critical praise, basically cementing Lucas’ place alongside Coppola, Speilberg, and Scorsese as a member of the “film school brats” of the early 1970’s. The film follows one wild night in the small town America of the early 1960’s, as two recent high school graduates (Richard Dreyfuss and Ron Howard) prepare to leave the town behind to go off to college. A series of thinly tied together vignettes that examine nostalgia, hope, fear of the unknown, love, lust, friendship, milkshakes, sock hops, and fast cars, American Graffiti is a film that encapsulates an idea, and an era so well that it guaranteed Lucas would be taken seriously and solidified him as a director of great promise.
I did suggest nary a paragraph ago that Star Wars might be viewed as the beginning of Lucas’ artistic death, and I want to clarify that I in no way mean that as a criticism of the film, which can only be described as awesome times infinity. Like pretty much everyone born between, say, 1970 and 1992 (I’m approximating here the year in which someone might have been old enough to have seen and fully absorbed the Original Trilogy before the release of the New Trilogy could have tainted their associations with Star Wars), the film is completely engrained into the way I view the world, and I’m not even sure that qualifies as comic hyperbole. I was raised on Star Wars, grew up on Star Wars, and still watch it at least once a year. Star Wars is very likely one of the reasons I approach the world with the pop culture obsessiveness that I do. So when I say that it may have precipitated Lucas’ creative death, I do not mean that Star Wars wasn’t a great movie; on the contrary, I think it may have been too good.
Think about it this way: when In the Aeroplane Over the Sea was released, Jeff Mangum effectively retired from making new music (at least so far, anyway, and a guy can dream, right?). I have always viewed this retirement as a sort of admission that the art, and the pressure that comes from creating great art, beat him. What I mean is that In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is pretty much the perfect album. Knowing he had made a masterpiece, I can imagine it would be difficult, if not impossible, to imagine returning to the studio to make more music. Whatever you did, it would inevitably be compared to your previous work, and it would probably pale by comparison. This is a theory I also ascribe to Harper Lee, who wrote To Kill a Mockingbird and then never put pen to paper again. Once you’ve made your masterpiece, it may be very difficult to try again. To a certain extent, what's the point?
In the same way, I wonder if Star Wars didn’t beat Lucas. He was just blossoming as a director when it was released, and it was the first script he had written by himself. Where THX 1138 had been a commercial failure and American Graffiti a sleeper success, Star Wars was made for a budget of $11 million and grossed $307,263,857 in its initial theatrical release (and in total to date has, by itself grossed over $775 million). And while both of his previous movies had received decent reviews, the praise for Star Wars was nearly unanimous (Though a few critics, including Pauline Kael, Peter Keough, and Stanley Kauffman panned the movie). Virtually from the moment of the film’s release, the world clamored for a sequel.
And at that point, Lucas just stopped. He wrote the story for The Empire Strikes Back, but the screenplay was written by Leigh Brackett and Lawrence Kasdan, and the film was directed by Irvin Kershner. He co-wrote Return of the Jedi with Kasdan, but that was directed by Richard Marquand (after tragically being turned down by David Lynch, who knew he wouldn’t get the freedom he required working with Lucas) and had begun production based on Lucas’ story long before the screenplay was ever written. While Lucas was instrumental to the creation of another of film’s most successful franchises, Indiana Jones, he served as a producer and story consultant on all of those films, never writing or directing any of them. He produced numerous films in the decades following the release of Star Wars, and even contributed ideas to some (though his creative ideas seem to experience diminishing marginal returns, as by 1988 when he produced The Land Before Time, he is credited only with coming up with the fairly obvious idea that the female triceratops should be named Cera), but for a long time it seemed like his desire to write and direct were completely gone.
Until, 22 years after his last directorial effort, Lucas stepped behind the camera again for The Phantom Menace, only his second film as a solo writer-director. Steve Wilson of Salon.com may have framed the problem with the film best when he said, “Perhaps the absolute creative freedom that director George Lucas enjoyed […] with no studio execs and not many an independently minded actor involved—is a path to the dark side.” After a two decade long hiatus from writing and directing, Lucas decided to take on a task that is Sisyphusean at best and to do so with no outside input. There was probably no way that Lucas could have made a film that surpassed the original trilogy; maybe even trying was a fool’s errand. Yet I’m not sure Lucas made the film as a true artistic endeavor.
There’s a distinct possibility that after being consumed by his marketing acumen decades earlier, his artistic impulses were too dormant to be awakened. But after going through a messy and costly divorce in 1987, and seeing the enduring popularity of his universe, Lucas began to develop the prequel trilogy in the early 1990s. That the new trilogy was a mercenary marketing decision intended to make Lucas millions upon millions of dollars regardless of their obvious lack of quality is a tragedy if it’s true, but at the same time it might soften the blow of their awfulness just a little. If George Lucas wasn’t trying and was just in it for the money, that makes him kind of a reprehensibly human being, but isn’t it slightly better than the idea that the man who created Star Wars and Indiana Jones became not just creatively barren but actively bad at coming up with and executing his ideas? I would rather live in a world where the new trilogy and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull were just moneymaking schemes inflicted on the general public because Lucas knows we’re all saps and wants to line his gold pockets with a few pieces of silver than exist in a world where Lucas died creatively around 1984 and ambled around Skywalker Ranch as an artistic zombie for the rest of his life turning out schlock and thinking it gold. Call it the optimist in me.
George Lucas has a much smaller body of work than many of the directors I have covered in this column previously, yet the work he did do has been vastly influential. Lucas altered the way movies are made and the way they are watched in a way that is so complete it’s almost impossible to describe his influence. And yes, at the end of the day a full half of his directorial efforts are terrible, terrible movies, but they’re also his catastrophes. No one else in the world could fail that spectacularly and just keep trudging on. The critical drubbing that ensued after The Phantom Menace might have deterred someone with less will or more respect for his fan base, but Lucas pushed on, turning out Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith, and reviving the Indiana Jones franchise with an idea so awful only he could have pushed it into theaters. When David Lynch turned down the opportunity to direct Return of the Jedi, it was because he knew the movie would be Lucas’ no matter who directed it. A vision as strong as his cannot be subsumed, no matter the cost to his reputation or to his soul. It’s kind of poetic, really, that Lucas in a way followed the advice of one of his most famous characters (in a line he almost certainly didn’t write). He did. Then he did not. But if one thing can be said of the modern Lucas, it’s that with him, there is no try.
Read more Whose Film Is It Anyway? here
Coming up on Who's Film Is It Anyway?:
2/27: Quentin Tarantino
3/13: Hal Ashby
3/27: Michael Bay
4/10:Aaron Sorkin
Note: The purpose of Whose Film Is It Anyway? is to examine the validity of the auteur theory through the lens of individual film-makers, taking a look at their bodies of work and highlighting the technical elements, personal style, and thematic consistency of their films. Ultimately, the goal of this column will be to generate a discussion of the merits of auteur theory through examinations of directors widely considered auteurs, analyses of directors whose status as auteurs is more tenuous, and occasional looks at non-directors who may drive the quality and content of their films with more assuredness than the directors they work with.
“Do or do not. There is no try.”-Yoda (Frank Oz), The Empire Strikes Back
George Lucas changed the face of the film industry vastly, permanently, and entirely. But probably not in the way you think, and not always for the better. Over a career that has now spanned 40 years, he directed just six movies, and wrote only four by himself (though he had co-writers on three others, bringing his screenplay count up to seven). He has been vastly more productive as a producer and as a creative force than he ever will be as a writer or a director. And while it’s possible, and even easy to lob criticisms at him as a terrible writer and a director who peaked years before his most famous film, no one can claim that he isn’t a visionary as an idea man.
The way he reshaped the film industry has little to do with this though, at least on the surface. Saying that George Lucas invented the independent film scene as we now know it is slightly inaccurate (there were independent films before him that followed a model more similar to the way they are made today than what he pioneered), yet in the way that really matter, George Lucas invented the independent film scene. By the time of his second feature as a director, 1973’s American Graffiti (which we will talk about in a moment), he had already created Lucasfilm, the production company that would release one of the biggest films of all time on its own just four years later. George Lucas made Star Wars (or, as its now more popularly known, Star Wars: Episode IV: A New Hope), a big budget smash hit, completely outside of the studio system.
You know what else George Lucas did that completely and inexorably altered the movie-making landscape? He invented the now completely inseparable idea of merchandising for his movies. As he put it himself, “I figured if I got posters and T-shirts and things with the name of the movie on it, it would help promote the movie. The whole idea that licensing would be a revenue stream didn't occur to anybody.” Every time you slept in your Star Wars sheets as a kid (or, for some of you, as a slightly embarrassing adult), every time you laughed at Yogurt’s schtick in Spaceballs, and pretty much every poster that was probably hanging in your room as a kid, even the ones that on the surface had nothing to do with George Lucas, really only exist because of George Lucas. Add to that what THX has done to improve the sound in movie theaters, making itself an omnipresent force nationwide (though the current incarnation has nothing to do with Lucas, it was developed by Lucasfilm to ensure that the fidelity of the sound in Return of the Jedi would be of high quality across the country), and the groundbreaking work both on the Star Wars films and in general contributed to special effects by ILM (Industrial Light & Magic), and George Lucas becomes one of the most instrumental forces in our entire conception of modern cinema.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvmZ9SPcTzU
But taking a step back, for a moment, to look at Lucas as a filmmaker, you’ll notice that his body of work is miniscule, and a full half of his movies as a writer and as a director are, too put it mildly, worse than two Holocausts. It wasn’t always that way, though. When THX 1138 was released in 1971, people pretty much just thought it was worse than a small Eastern European genocide. The film was produced by Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola based on a short film Lucas had made while in film school at USC. When the duo brought the finished film to Warner Bros, who had recently loaned Coppola $300,000 to open his own studio, American Zoetrope, Warner Bros. wanted their money back, and forced Lucas to cut down the film before its release. The debt that THX 1138 put American Zoetrope in forced Coppola to reluctantly take on another project to keep his studio afloat. And that unenthusiastic project would grow up to be The Godfather. For those of you keeping score at home, that means that in addition to being responsible for the flaming abortion that is the prequel trilogy, George Lucas also unwittingly brought us The Godfather. Sure, he re-edited his movies so Greedo shoots first and Jabba the Hutt has terrible musical taste, but his blunders also brought us Marlon Brando and Robert De Niro’s incendiary portrayals of Vito Corleone (I’m conjecturing here, that if Coppola hadn’t made The Godfather, he never would have made Part II, which I think a fair assumption). Where does that leave Lucas karmically? This is a question that will probably keep me up nights.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6Z2ag8FMZw
THX 1138 was far from a commercial success (though it did recoup its budget), and was critically dismissed at the time (though it did receive fairly good reviews), which is kind of surprising considering its easily Lucas’ best directed film. It follows the titular THX (Robert Duvall) on his quest to escape the strictures of his totalitarian society where love is prohibited and free thinking greatly discouraged. In Lucas’ mind, it seems, the distant past was a time of enlightenment when good could triumph over evil (let’s not forget, fellow film geeks, that Star Wars is set “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…”), but the future is a dystopian nightmare where people can’t grow hair, fall in love, or pursue their dreams. This might shed more light on Lucas’ film career than it seems. In his early days, he made a very good sci-fi film that criticized consumerism and mirrored his own personal struggle for artistic freedom in a studio system that wouldn’t allow him to shine. Yet within a decade after the release of THX 1138 he had fallen down the rabbit hole, changing his mind about the original intended death of Han Solo because he worried it might hurt action figure sales. Oh, how the mighty had fallen (by becoming insanely more rich and successful than I can even conceive of, both because he had a lot of money and because counting has never been my greatest strength).
If Star Wars can be viewed as the beginning of Lucas’ artistic death, as the point right before his creative integrity was devoured by his own marketing ingenuity like an Ouroboros of getting rich off of action figures instead of great movies, then American Graffiti can be seen in a whole new light. It exists as Lucas’ second feature, and his last movie within the studio system (it was co-produced by Universal Pictures, in addition to The Coppola Company and the new Lucasfilm), as another example of an assured director gaining confidence along with his experience, and as the point at which cineastes had to stand up and recognize Lucas as a potential filmic force to be reckoned with. It became a sleeper hit commercially and garnered high critical praise, basically cementing Lucas’ place alongside Coppola, Speilberg, and Scorsese as a member of the “film school brats” of the early 1970’s. The film follows one wild night in the small town America of the early 1960’s, as two recent high school graduates (Richard Dreyfuss and Ron Howard) prepare to leave the town behind to go off to college. A series of thinly tied together vignettes that examine nostalgia, hope, fear of the unknown, love, lust, friendship, milkshakes, sock hops, and fast cars, American Graffiti is a film that encapsulates an idea, and an era so well that it guaranteed Lucas would be taken seriously and solidified him as a director of great promise.
I did suggest nary a paragraph ago that Star Wars might be viewed as the beginning of Lucas’ artistic death, and I want to clarify that I in no way mean that as a criticism of the film, which can only be described as awesome times infinity. Like pretty much everyone born between, say, 1970 and 1992 (I’m approximating here the year in which someone might have been old enough to have seen and fully absorbed the Original Trilogy before the release of the New Trilogy could have tainted their associations with Star Wars), the film is completely engrained into the way I view the world, and I’m not even sure that qualifies as comic hyperbole. I was raised on Star Wars, grew up on Star Wars, and still watch it at least once a year. Star Wars is very likely one of the reasons I approach the world with the pop culture obsessiveness that I do. So when I say that it may have precipitated Lucas’ creative death, I do not mean that Star Wars wasn’t a great movie; on the contrary, I think it may have been too good.
Think about it this way: when In the Aeroplane Over the Sea was released, Jeff Mangum effectively retired from making new music (at least so far, anyway, and a guy can dream, right?). I have always viewed this retirement as a sort of admission that the art, and the pressure that comes from creating great art, beat him. What I mean is that In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is pretty much the perfect album. Knowing he had made a masterpiece, I can imagine it would be difficult, if not impossible, to imagine returning to the studio to make more music. Whatever you did, it would inevitably be compared to your previous work, and it would probably pale by comparison. This is a theory I also ascribe to Harper Lee, who wrote To Kill a Mockingbird and then never put pen to paper again. Once you’ve made your masterpiece, it may be very difficult to try again. To a certain extent, what's the point?
In the same way, I wonder if Star Wars didn’t beat Lucas. He was just blossoming as a director when it was released, and it was the first script he had written by himself. Where THX 1138 had been a commercial failure and American Graffiti a sleeper success, Star Wars was made for a budget of $11 million and grossed $307,263,857 in its initial theatrical release (and in total to date has, by itself grossed over $775 million). And while both of his previous movies had received decent reviews, the praise for Star Wars was nearly unanimous (Though a few critics, including Pauline Kael, Peter Keough, and Stanley Kauffman panned the movie). Virtually from the moment of the film’s release, the world clamored for a sequel.
And at that point, Lucas just stopped. He wrote the story for The Empire Strikes Back, but the screenplay was written by Leigh Brackett and Lawrence Kasdan, and the film was directed by Irvin Kershner. He co-wrote Return of the Jedi with Kasdan, but that was directed by Richard Marquand (after tragically being turned down by David Lynch, who knew he wouldn’t get the freedom he required working with Lucas) and had begun production based on Lucas’ story long before the screenplay was ever written. While Lucas was instrumental to the creation of another of film’s most successful franchises, Indiana Jones, he served as a producer and story consultant on all of those films, never writing or directing any of them. He produced numerous films in the decades following the release of Star Wars, and even contributed ideas to some (though his creative ideas seem to experience diminishing marginal returns, as by 1988 when he produced The Land Before Time, he is credited only with coming up with the fairly obvious idea that the female triceratops should be named Cera), but for a long time it seemed like his desire to write and direct were completely gone.
Until, 22 years after his last directorial effort, Lucas stepped behind the camera again for The Phantom Menace, only his second film as a solo writer-director. Steve Wilson of Salon.com may have framed the problem with the film best when he said, “Perhaps the absolute creative freedom that director George Lucas enjoyed […] with no studio execs and not many an independently minded actor involved—is a path to the dark side.” After a two decade long hiatus from writing and directing, Lucas decided to take on a task that is Sisyphusean at best and to do so with no outside input. There was probably no way that Lucas could have made a film that surpassed the original trilogy; maybe even trying was a fool’s errand. Yet I’m not sure Lucas made the film as a true artistic endeavor.
There’s a distinct possibility that after being consumed by his marketing acumen decades earlier, his artistic impulses were too dormant to be awakened. But after going through a messy and costly divorce in 1987, and seeing the enduring popularity of his universe, Lucas began to develop the prequel trilogy in the early 1990s. That the new trilogy was a mercenary marketing decision intended to make Lucas millions upon millions of dollars regardless of their obvious lack of quality is a tragedy if it’s true, but at the same time it might soften the blow of their awfulness just a little. If George Lucas wasn’t trying and was just in it for the money, that makes him kind of a reprehensibly human being, but isn’t it slightly better than the idea that the man who created Star Wars and Indiana Jones became not just creatively barren but actively bad at coming up with and executing his ideas? I would rather live in a world where the new trilogy and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull were just moneymaking schemes inflicted on the general public because Lucas knows we’re all saps and wants to line his gold pockets with a few pieces of silver than exist in a world where Lucas died creatively around 1984 and ambled around Skywalker Ranch as an artistic zombie for the rest of his life turning out schlock and thinking it gold. Call it the optimist in me.
George Lucas has a much smaller body of work than many of the directors I have covered in this column previously, yet the work he did do has been vastly influential. Lucas altered the way movies are made and the way they are watched in a way that is so complete it’s almost impossible to describe his influence. And yes, at the end of the day a full half of his directorial efforts are terrible, terrible movies, but they’re also his catastrophes. No one else in the world could fail that spectacularly and just keep trudging on. The critical drubbing that ensued after The Phantom Menace might have deterred someone with less will or more respect for his fan base, but Lucas pushed on, turning out Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith, and reviving the Indiana Jones franchise with an idea so awful only he could have pushed it into theaters. When David Lynch turned down the opportunity to direct Return of the Jedi, it was because he knew the movie would be Lucas’ no matter who directed it. A vision as strong as his cannot be subsumed, no matter the cost to his reputation or to his soul. It’s kind of poetic, really, that Lucas in a way followed the advice of one of his most famous characters (in a line he almost certainly didn’t write). He did. Then he did not. But if one thing can be said of the modern Lucas, it’s that with him, there is no try.
Read more Whose Film Is It Anyway? here
Coming up on Who's Film Is It Anyway?:
2/27: Quentin Tarantino
3/13: Hal Ashby
3/27: Michael Bay
4/10:Aaron Sorkin
Monday, January 31, 2011
Whose Film Is It Anyway?: Akira Kurosawa
By Jordan
Note: The purpose of Whose Film Is It Anyway? is to examine the validity of the auteur theory through the lens of individual film-makers, taking a look at their bodies of work and highlighting the technical elements, personal style, and thematic consistency of their films. Ultimately, the goal of this column will be to generate a discussion of the merits of auteur theory through examinations of directors widely considered auteurs, analyses of directors whose status as auteurs is more tenuous, and occasional looks at non-directors who may drive the quality and content of their films with more assuredness than the directors they work with.
“The greatest living example of all that an author of the cinema should be.”-Federico Fellini, on Akira Kurosawa
“One thing that distinguishes him is that he didn’t make one masterpiece or two masterpieces. He made, you know, eight masterpieces.” –Francis Ford Coppola, on Kurosawa
Perhaps the most difficult thing about writing this column is coming up against the greats in cinema history and trying to condense their legendary status into 2,000 words and one or a few topics. There is no way to possibly do justice to a cinematic legacy as rich and diverse as that of Akira Kurosawa. And yet, here I am, trying anyway. Kurosawa made films for 50 years, starting directly after the end of World War II and continuing until shortly before his death in 1998 at 88 years old. Cinema was his one driving passion, so much so that when his wife of 45 years died during the filming of Ran, his last epic, he stopped production for one day to mourn and then just kept shooting. Over the course of his career he brought Japanese cinema to the rest of the world, becoming so critically lauded that his movies were seen the world over. Throughout his career, Kurosawa took pains to document and translate aspects of Japanese culture to audiences all around the world, and thus to give people insight into the country’s history and its reactions to the destruction of World War II.
In 1950, Kurosawa burst onto the international scene with Rashomon, an examination of the subjective nature of experience, a look into the darkest aspects of man’s soul, and a refutation of objective truth. The film examines the rape of a woman (Machiko Kyo) and the murder of her husband (Masayuki Mori) by a bandit (Toshiro Mifune, a longtime Kurosawa collaborator), and examines the efforts of first a magistrate, and later three peasants (including Takashi Shimura, another longtime collaborator as a woodcutter who witnessed the encounter) to determine what actually occurred. The story is relayed from the point of view of each character and comes across in wildly different ways. The film offers the simple message that each person has an agenda and their version of the events is bound to be colored by it, but it also examines the class structure and sexual politics of samurai era Japan in-depth. The woman, in varying accounts, is so shamed by the rape that she demands her husband kill the bandit, or the bandit kill her husband, so that it can still be said that she has only been with one man. The woodcutter would seem to have the definitive account until his position as the unbiased witness is compromised. Yet an act of seemingly pure kindness (which is likely still motivated by guilt), the film ends on the idea that people can do good, especially if their motives aren’t examined too carefully.
Two years later, Kurosawa examined modern Japan, the postwar bureaucracy, and the need for life to have meaning in the beautiful, inspirational Ikiru, which follows Kanji Watanabe (Takashi Shimura, in perhaps his best performance), an aging and widowed bureaucrat with a son and daughter in law that seem to care only about their inheritance. When he discovers that he has a terminal case of stomach cancer and less than a year to live, he determines to live it to the fullest, attempting to immerse himself in the Japanese nightlife and trying to learn how to live joyously from a raucous young co-worker before finally deciding to overcome to bureaucracy and spend his last months building a park for the children of his community. Uplifting, gorgeous, and completely inspirational, Ikiru criticizes the Japanese postwar bureaucracy, sure, but more importantly exists as a testament to the indomitable spirit of man, who tirelessly attempts to find happiness and meaning in a life that often seems devoid of both.
In 1954 Kurosawa made easily his most famous film, Seven Samurai, an epic following the efforts of a poor village to survive an attack by bandits by hiring the eponymous warriors to defend them. One of the first films to ever show a team being assembled and developing a strategy before undertaking their mission (a structure that has been aped by everything from the western remake The Magnificent Seven to The Dirty Dozen and even Ocean’s Eleven), the film examines samurai culture and looks again at the class structure of feudal Japan. As the film nears its conclusion, the samurai muse that even if they win the battle, the true victor will be the farmers, whose work will survive untold generations while the samurai’s traditions will disappear.
Following that, Kurosawa took on the postwar fears of his people directly in I Live in Fear: Record of a Living Being, which follows an elderly man (Toshiro Mifune) so terrified of nuclear annihilation that he tries to convince his family to move to Brazil where he believes they will escape the fallout. In response, his family takes him to court to have him declared incompetent so he can’t spend their inheritance moving them to South America. The doctor who evaluates the man (Takashi Shimura) at first believes he is incompetent, but then begins to question whether the man makes sense in a world gone mad. The film questions attitudes toward the elderly, the Japanese court system, and examines the postwar nihilism that afflicted so many in Japan.
Kurosawa next took on Shakespearean lore, adapting Macbeth into a tale of samurai ambition in 1957’s Throne of Blood. The film follows Washizu (Toshiro Mifune), a loyal soldier who is told by a spirit in the woods that he will soon be Lord of the Forest Castle, which, along with the ambitious machinations of his wife Asaji (Isuzu Yamada) drives Washizu on a murderous rampage to claim what’s rightfully his. An exercise in combining a narrative well known to the west with the style of Japan, Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood has often been called the most successful film adaptation of Macbeth to date.
In 1958 Kurosawa released The Hidden Fortress, a film that would go on to inspire the structure (and many of the story beats) of Star Wars: A New Hope nearly twenty years later. The film follows two bickering peasants (Minoru Chiaki and Kamatari Fujiwara) who escape from a battle and find themselves traveling with a battle hardened general (Toshiro Mifune) who aims to transport a defeated Princess (Misa Uehara) and what remains of her fortune to safe territory. Together they transport the Princess through enemy territory, hoping to get her to a place where she can rebuild her armies and retake her land. Sound familiar?
Kurosawa spent much of the 1960’s making financial failures (though a few critical successes, most notably 1965’s Red Beard, his last collaboration with Toshiro Mifune) and by the late 1970’s, was forced to look abroad for financing to make his next films. His last great epic, 1985’s Ran went back to the Shakespearean well and adapted King Lear, again set against a samurai backdrop. Lord Hidetora (Tatsuya Nakadai), a fierce warrior who has defeated many enemies and created a large empire, decides to abdicate his throne and divide his kingdom among his three sons. What results is a tragic battle for power in which Hidetora is driven out of all the places he once called home and goes mad from isolation while his sons, and eventually his former enemies are embroiled in a seemingly endless war for land and power.
His next film, 1990’s Dreams, is arguably the director’s most personal effort, documenting a series of recurring dreams that Kurosawa had throughout his life. From the childlike wonder of “The Peach Orchard” to the fear of death in “The Blizzard,” to the survivors guilt of “The Tunnel,” to the artistic celebration of “Crows” (which notably features Martin Scorsese as Vincent Van Gogh), to the nuclear terror of “The Demon Weeps” and finally to the tranquil peace of “The Village of the Watermills” the film feels like a step into the director’s head, and an examination of what made Kurosawa tick.
So vast is Kurosawa’s technical influence that I would be remiss if I didn’t discuss some of his most important flourished. He was known for use of the axial cut, in which the camera moves closer to or farther from the subject not through tracking but through a series of matched jump cuts that give the scene the feeling of increased detachment. Kurosawa was also known for his tendency to cut on motion, cutting during an action so that it is completed in two shots instead of the standard one. Finally, Kurosawa was a huge proponent of the wipe, in which action cuts from one scene to another by “wiping away the image” (a technique often used by George Lucas, who we will discuss in the next installment).
Akira Kurosawa directed 30 films over a 50 year career. He wrote or co-wrote the screenplay for every single film he directed, and also edited all of them (only taking on screen credit for some). In addition to this, he was instrumental in location scouting, costume design, cinematography, and directly coached each actor on the specifics of their performance, even going so far as to tell leach of the samurai in Seven Samurai how their characters might tie their shoes. Each moment in a Kurosawa film is engineered exactly as the director wanted, written to his specifications, performed as he envisioned, shot where and how he wanted, and edited to have the exact sense of pace an motion he desired. Perhaps more than any director we have yet covered, Kurosawa ensured that each and every work he released was wholly and completely his own.
Read more Whose Film Is It Anyway? here
Coming up on Who's Film Is It Anyway?:
2/13: George Lucas
2/27: Quentin Tarantino
3/13: Hal Ashby
3/27: Michael Bay
Note: The purpose of Whose Film Is It Anyway? is to examine the validity of the auteur theory through the lens of individual film-makers, taking a look at their bodies of work and highlighting the technical elements, personal style, and thematic consistency of their films. Ultimately, the goal of this column will be to generate a discussion of the merits of auteur theory through examinations of directors widely considered auteurs, analyses of directors whose status as auteurs is more tenuous, and occasional looks at non-directors who may drive the quality and content of their films with more assuredness than the directors they work with.
“The greatest living example of all that an author of the cinema should be.”-Federico Fellini, on Akira Kurosawa
“One thing that distinguishes him is that he didn’t make one masterpiece or two masterpieces. He made, you know, eight masterpieces.” –Francis Ford Coppola, on Kurosawa
Perhaps the most difficult thing about writing this column is coming up against the greats in cinema history and trying to condense their legendary status into 2,000 words and one or a few topics. There is no way to possibly do justice to a cinematic legacy as rich and diverse as that of Akira Kurosawa. And yet, here I am, trying anyway. Kurosawa made films for 50 years, starting directly after the end of World War II and continuing until shortly before his death in 1998 at 88 years old. Cinema was his one driving passion, so much so that when his wife of 45 years died during the filming of Ran, his last epic, he stopped production for one day to mourn and then just kept shooting. Over the course of his career he brought Japanese cinema to the rest of the world, becoming so critically lauded that his movies were seen the world over. Throughout his career, Kurosawa took pains to document and translate aspects of Japanese culture to audiences all around the world, and thus to give people insight into the country’s history and its reactions to the destruction of World War II.
In 1950, Kurosawa burst onto the international scene with Rashomon, an examination of the subjective nature of experience, a look into the darkest aspects of man’s soul, and a refutation of objective truth. The film examines the rape of a woman (Machiko Kyo) and the murder of her husband (Masayuki Mori) by a bandit (Toshiro Mifune, a longtime Kurosawa collaborator), and examines the efforts of first a magistrate, and later three peasants (including Takashi Shimura, another longtime collaborator as a woodcutter who witnessed the encounter) to determine what actually occurred. The story is relayed from the point of view of each character and comes across in wildly different ways. The film offers the simple message that each person has an agenda and their version of the events is bound to be colored by it, but it also examines the class structure and sexual politics of samurai era Japan in-depth. The woman, in varying accounts, is so shamed by the rape that she demands her husband kill the bandit, or the bandit kill her husband, so that it can still be said that she has only been with one man. The woodcutter would seem to have the definitive account until his position as the unbiased witness is compromised. Yet an act of seemingly pure kindness (which is likely still motivated by guilt), the film ends on the idea that people can do good, especially if their motives aren’t examined too carefully.
Two years later, Kurosawa examined modern Japan, the postwar bureaucracy, and the need for life to have meaning in the beautiful, inspirational Ikiru, which follows Kanji Watanabe (Takashi Shimura, in perhaps his best performance), an aging and widowed bureaucrat with a son and daughter in law that seem to care only about their inheritance. When he discovers that he has a terminal case of stomach cancer and less than a year to live, he determines to live it to the fullest, attempting to immerse himself in the Japanese nightlife and trying to learn how to live joyously from a raucous young co-worker before finally deciding to overcome to bureaucracy and spend his last months building a park for the children of his community. Uplifting, gorgeous, and completely inspirational, Ikiru criticizes the Japanese postwar bureaucracy, sure, but more importantly exists as a testament to the indomitable spirit of man, who tirelessly attempts to find happiness and meaning in a life that often seems devoid of both.
In 1954 Kurosawa made easily his most famous film, Seven Samurai, an epic following the efforts of a poor village to survive an attack by bandits by hiring the eponymous warriors to defend them. One of the first films to ever show a team being assembled and developing a strategy before undertaking their mission (a structure that has been aped by everything from the western remake The Magnificent Seven to The Dirty Dozen and even Ocean’s Eleven), the film examines samurai culture and looks again at the class structure of feudal Japan. As the film nears its conclusion, the samurai muse that even if they win the battle, the true victor will be the farmers, whose work will survive untold generations while the samurai’s traditions will disappear.
Following that, Kurosawa took on the postwar fears of his people directly in I Live in Fear: Record of a Living Being, which follows an elderly man (Toshiro Mifune) so terrified of nuclear annihilation that he tries to convince his family to move to Brazil where he believes they will escape the fallout. In response, his family takes him to court to have him declared incompetent so he can’t spend their inheritance moving them to South America. The doctor who evaluates the man (Takashi Shimura) at first believes he is incompetent, but then begins to question whether the man makes sense in a world gone mad. The film questions attitudes toward the elderly, the Japanese court system, and examines the postwar nihilism that afflicted so many in Japan.
Kurosawa next took on Shakespearean lore, adapting Macbeth into a tale of samurai ambition in 1957’s Throne of Blood. The film follows Washizu (Toshiro Mifune), a loyal soldier who is told by a spirit in the woods that he will soon be Lord of the Forest Castle, which, along with the ambitious machinations of his wife Asaji (Isuzu Yamada) drives Washizu on a murderous rampage to claim what’s rightfully his. An exercise in combining a narrative well known to the west with the style of Japan, Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood has often been called the most successful film adaptation of Macbeth to date.
In 1958 Kurosawa released The Hidden Fortress, a film that would go on to inspire the structure (and many of the story beats) of Star Wars: A New Hope nearly twenty years later. The film follows two bickering peasants (Minoru Chiaki and Kamatari Fujiwara) who escape from a battle and find themselves traveling with a battle hardened general (Toshiro Mifune) who aims to transport a defeated Princess (Misa Uehara) and what remains of her fortune to safe territory. Together they transport the Princess through enemy territory, hoping to get her to a place where she can rebuild her armies and retake her land. Sound familiar?
Kurosawa spent much of the 1960’s making financial failures (though a few critical successes, most notably 1965’s Red Beard, his last collaboration with Toshiro Mifune) and by the late 1970’s, was forced to look abroad for financing to make his next films. His last great epic, 1985’s Ran went back to the Shakespearean well and adapted King Lear, again set against a samurai backdrop. Lord Hidetora (Tatsuya Nakadai), a fierce warrior who has defeated many enemies and created a large empire, decides to abdicate his throne and divide his kingdom among his three sons. What results is a tragic battle for power in which Hidetora is driven out of all the places he once called home and goes mad from isolation while his sons, and eventually his former enemies are embroiled in a seemingly endless war for land and power.
His next film, 1990’s Dreams, is arguably the director’s most personal effort, documenting a series of recurring dreams that Kurosawa had throughout his life. From the childlike wonder of “The Peach Orchard” to the fear of death in “The Blizzard,” to the survivors guilt of “The Tunnel,” to the artistic celebration of “Crows” (which notably features Martin Scorsese as Vincent Van Gogh), to the nuclear terror of “The Demon Weeps” and finally to the tranquil peace of “The Village of the Watermills” the film feels like a step into the director’s head, and an examination of what made Kurosawa tick.
So vast is Kurosawa’s technical influence that I would be remiss if I didn’t discuss some of his most important flourished. He was known for use of the axial cut, in which the camera moves closer to or farther from the subject not through tracking but through a series of matched jump cuts that give the scene the feeling of increased detachment. Kurosawa was also known for his tendency to cut on motion, cutting during an action so that it is completed in two shots instead of the standard one. Finally, Kurosawa was a huge proponent of the wipe, in which action cuts from one scene to another by “wiping away the image” (a technique often used by George Lucas, who we will discuss in the next installment).
Akira Kurosawa directed 30 films over a 50 year career. He wrote or co-wrote the screenplay for every single film he directed, and also edited all of them (only taking on screen credit for some). In addition to this, he was instrumental in location scouting, costume design, cinematography, and directly coached each actor on the specifics of their performance, even going so far as to tell leach of the samurai in Seven Samurai how their characters might tie their shoes. Each moment in a Kurosawa film is engineered exactly as the director wanted, written to his specifications, performed as he envisioned, shot where and how he wanted, and edited to have the exact sense of pace an motion he desired. Perhaps more than any director we have yet covered, Kurosawa ensured that each and every work he released was wholly and completely his own.
Read more Whose Film Is It Anyway? here
Coming up on Who's Film Is It Anyway?:
2/13: George Lucas
2/27: Quentin Tarantino
3/13: Hal Ashby
3/27: Michael Bay
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